The End of Sleep
by AlisonHarvey
Summary: Three centuries after she defeated Jareth, the reborn Sarah Williams is forced to flee to the Labyrinth, oblivious to her past...and to what she means to the Goblin King.
1. What She Regretted

**The End of Sleep**

by Alison Harvey

Disclaimer: Characters from the movie Labyrinth belong to Henson & Co. All else is mine.

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_Cleopatra:_

Courteous lord, one word.  
Sir, you and I must part, but that's not it:  
Sir, you and I have lov'd, but there's not it;  
That you know well: something it is I would,  
O! my oblivion is a very Antony,  
And I am all forgotten.

_--Antony and Cleopatra_ (I.iii.106-111)

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Chapter 1: What She Regretted

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In 2071, the world changed. The first Martian colonists returned, bringing with them a new, evolved supervirus that killed billions before a cure was found. Doomsday cults reigned over the population, and world leaders were assassinated by the dozens in an attempt to bring the afterlife sooner. The multinational biotechnology corporations announced their cure in 2128, but their price was dear.

It is now 2306. Life is scarce in all forms, tainted generations earlier by those driven mad by plague. The corporations control the world through their puppet presidents and ministers. The United States has split into two distinct countries: Eamerica, centered in Boston, and California, named for the state that controls it. Magic, long ago bred out of the people by fear and ignorance, is at last beginning to return.

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Footsteps pounded in the night.

No one was there to hear the frantic beat of scuffed shoes on cracked pavement, or see the teenage girl and the young boy run for their lives.

Only the church stood silent witness to their flight, waiting in the darkness at the top of the hill. It was a small and unassuming building of grey stone, built and tended with care long since flown with the rest of the population. Only the huge double doors, monstrous creations of dark wood studded with brass, remained untouched by the loops of green ivy that strove to break each stone into pebbles and dust. The courtyard and its heap of broken gravestones was fenced away from the barren, dead land by a simple brick wall, its empty archway framing the worn stairs up to the church.

In mid-stride, the girl pointed to the hill, her loose braid streaming behind her in the darkness.

"Look!" she yelled, the wind of her passage snatching her words almost before they could reach the boy who ran with her. "There it is!"

She ran onwards, hands tightly clasping the straps of her torn knapsack as she bounded through the fallen gate and up the steps. The boy clenched his jaw, saving his energy for the last mad dash needed to finish his flight. He reached her a moment later, panting for breath and clutching at the cramp in his stomach.

"You didn't say nothing about the bars," he said sullenly when he had caught enough air to speak again. "Just the lock." He looked up at her accusingly, large blue eyes wide in his thin face, his small ponytail crudely tied with a piece of twine. He was painfully bony for his small size, and painted with swirls of black dirt that hinted at no personal experience with soap and water.

His similarly filthy and gaunt companion was quiet, dark eyes intent on the small, rusted sign nailed to the outermost brace. Someone had gone to great measures to seal this building, hammering large beams of wood across the venerable doors. None showed even the slightest scuffmarks of attempted removal.

The sign read "Nuclear waste repository."

She repeated this to the boy as she fidgeted with her long, knotted braid, undoing the string that tied it and fumbling futilely to unwind it the matted hair enough to re-braid the strands.

The boy made a face at the words. "Course it's not." He paused. "Isn't it, Sarah?"

Sarah rolled her eyes, fastening the braid once more and shoving it back over her shoulder. "Would I take you in if it was?" She touched one plank and nodded when her fingertip came away smeared green. She wiped it on her clothes, a patched and heavily stitched pair of pants and shirt that might charitably be called rags. "Mold," she said with satisfaction. "It'll have rotted the wood enough around the nails."

The boy paused to look behind and was relieved to see only the empty road, stretching lazily back towards what passed for civilization this far north. He listened, but heard only the ceaseless pounding of the ocean on the shore beyond the hills.

"Hurry!" he said, shoving at her. "I think we got a few minutes, but they'll figure it out soon enough."

Sarah paused a moment longer, then nodded. Reaching into her pack, she pulled out a bent crowbar and a stained ball of cloth. She tossed the cloth to the boy, who caught it with care. He peeled away the layers slowly, revealing four shining wires that were startlingly pristine against the crusted dirt of his hands.

"Get to work, Tommy," she said sharply, already digging the crowbar beneath the far end of the first plank. She pulled, a smile cracking her lips as the wood began to peel away.

Tommy shrugged and did so, tracing the outline of the lock reverently.

"Chie!" she cursed; the bar had slipped on the slimy wood and thrown her off-balance. She teetered for a moment on the step but quickly regained her balance.

Tommy grinned. Unlike her predecessors, Carmencita "Chie" Spencer Yang, President of Eamerica, hadn't waited for phony elections to seize control, instead instigating a bloody coup d'etat. Her vicious persecution of dissidents had directly led to Tommy and Sarah's current predicament. Only Sarah, in Tommy's experience, could twist the name so violently into a curse.

"Better Chie than the Mekuza," he pointed out matter-of-factly, referring to the squads of violent men who enforced Chie's excessive tithes and laws. He picked up the first wire, holding it out in the dim starlight to check the length.

"The Mekuza," she grunted out, throwing her weight against the crowbar, "work for Chie. What's the difference?" The fall of the first brace punctuated her words. Both managed to jump away in time, although Sarah spared a rueful glance for her foot, only an inch away from the fallen beam.

"Yes," said the boy slyly as he stepped up and fitted the wire to the old-fashioned keyhole. "But would you rather meet Chie or a Mekuzae tonight?"

"Chie," she conceded. Anyone was preferable to a combat-trained Mekuzae, especially those of the Mekuza death-squad that had been chasing them from village to village for a week now. Neither she or Tommy were prepared to fight after a week with little food or sleep. They had two meals and two knives apiece: if this last stand failed then they were sure to be tortured and killed as an example.

"We probably shouldn't name them out loud," she counseled Tommy absentmindedly as she kicked the fallen plank down the stairs. "We still don't know how they found us in Augusta, or outside of Boston." The Mekuza had tracked them despite her best false trails, double-backs, and disguises, which worried her more than she was prepared to admit to the young boy.

He nodded. The wire clicked and Tommy withdrew it, bending the tip carefully with the torn nail of his grubby finger.

Sarah was fitting the crowbar to the next plank as he made the second bend, and he had to jump back at least four times more before she had caught enough breath to berate him.

"What's taking so long!" she spat out, glancing at him suspiciously.

With an exasperated look, the thin boy inspected the now intricately twisted and bent wire. "You know, the usual."

She turned to inspect the road, shielding her eyes from the sweat running down her face. She froze for a moment. "They're coming."

"What?" he said, his voice cracking even higher than his usual prepubescent pitch. He looked down the road and was even more alarmed to see nothing. "But I can't see them!"

She wedged the crowbar under the final brace with vicious satisfaction. "They're coming. We're out of time."

As the final plank crashed to the ground, he inserted the wire again. The lock clicked loudly as the wire slotted into place. Tommy bobbed his head frantically, clearly trying to resist looking back. "It's open."

Sarah stepped up and tried the door handle, only to curse loudly after the handle turned but the door remained shut. With a dark glare, she put her shoulder to the door and began to push with protesting muscles. Tommy added his weight to the door, throwing his shoulder against it with a familiarity born of long practice. They were near-experts at breaking into abandoned buildings: the only safe houses rebels could trust.

Under their combined weight, the door gave in and creaked open ponderously. The two stumbled in under their own momentum, blinking wearily at the moonlight that streamed in through the stained glass windows.

"It's untouched," Tommy said in wonder, looking at the carved statues of men and women, drawn for a moment to the poignant statue of the woman gazing adoringly at her child. His eyes strayed to the rotting velvet curtains hung at the entranceway to two booths against the wall, pausing on the crumbled remains of flowers heaped in vases by the statues. "No one's been in here!"

"Probably no one since the plague," Sarah commented, letting her hand skim over the smooth wood of the centuries-old pews as she walked down the central aisle. "They'd've been too afraid of plague bombs to gather."

He continued his survey, oblivious to the turn in her thoughts. "That looks like real wax candles, too!"

"Won't work," the girl said curtly, shaken out of the melancholy reverie by his comment. "Only the one I have in my pack will do."

Tommy began gathering them anyway. "We could use them when we get out of here," he explained when he saw her raised eyebrows.

"If we get out of here, we don't know what will happen."

"Then we don't know if we need them, do we? I've only got one more lightstick, and candles are impossible to trace in e-magnescans..."

She shrugged in defeat, already examining the massive black marble altar, carved with intertwining Greek letters. A few sweeps of her sleeve cleared away a circle of dust, and she dropped to the floor. Hurriedly, she unlaced her pack and dumped its contents into the circle, revealing a pitiful heap of half-eaten crusts and green-black cheese. She snatched up a torn piece of paper, scanning it hurriedly before tossing it to one side.

Tommy, returned from plundering the saints, picked it up and squinted at it. "What's it say?"

Sarah said nothing, lost in concentration as she picked through the contents of the pack, gathering up a black-handled knife, a fat blue candle, a blackened, tiny bell, and a golden ring. "Match?"

He dug in one fraying pocket and offered a match coated in pink nail polish. She took it and gingerly struck it against the altar, lighting the candle with the burning sulphur. She watched the first trails of smoke carefully, nodding when it began to spiral steadily to the ceiling.

The dull thud of marching feet, soft but unmistakable, filtered through the open doors. Tommy sprang up, running to the doorway and peering out. "They're just coming 'round the road," he said, voice fluting high in his panic.

"Don't let them see you," Sarah warned, then turned her attention back to the circle that surrounded her. She began to chant steadily, strange words and clicks that sounded impossible for a human tongue and throat to voice.

"They've fourteen," Tommy continued, unable to look away from the Mekuza squad. "And they have someone with them..." He squinted and then jumped away.

"Sarah, they got someone with magic! Someone strong!"

She chanted faster in response, sprinkling dust on the flame. Her words became deeper and more guttural as she spat onto her hand and let the fire lick her skin. She jumped as it began to burn but did not move away until a patch of skin on her wrist was reddened and nearly charred with heat.

Tommy's eyes went wide as he peeked outside again. "No!" he screamed, scrambling away from his lookout post and slamming the doors shut. There were shouts from the road as the squad saw the movement and sped up. The sound of running feet grew louder.

Shaking violently, Tommy staggered over to Sarah, who was still chanting and watching the candle intently. Lifting the bell carefully, she rang it once. The corners of the old church took the tinny sound and threw it back at the pair like thunderous church bells.

Tommy trembled as the echoes reached him. "He's strong, Sarah. Hurry before he figures it out and gets through to me." He looked at her, frightened. "I let him see me, I'm sorry. I can feel him trying to use me."

Sarah reached out her hand. Hesitantly, he laid his hand palm up on hers. She sliced across the ball of his thumb with the knife, cutting herself the same way before he could jerk his hand away or cry out. She pressed their fingers together with a wild look in her eyes as the sound of the running men grew nearer.

"They're through the gate," Tommy moaned. "He knows I'm here...Sarah, don't let them have me!"

She let the mixed blood drip from her finger onto the flame, chanting the last few words quickly. She tripped over the last phrase in her rush and swore softly, taking a deep breath to calm herself. Carefully, she repeated the ruined phrase as their mingled blood hissed and spat in the flame. Both flinched as she slipped the ring over her left thumb.

The candle died at the same moment the Mekuza threw the doors open.

The two rebels, crouched guiltily in front of the massive marble altar, stared at the men who had torn the doors down. The squad was young, clean and well-groomed, wearing expensive armor in a hodgepodge of elaborate leather, Kevlar, and ceramic pieces. They all looked well fed and well kept, each with neat queues of plaited hair that made Tommy's imitation seem childish and ill considered. The leader, who wore a golden badge on his shoulder, licked his lips as his gaze fell on Sarah.

"We meet again, female," he said with an oily chuckle, tightening his grip on his gun. Behind him, his men began to laugh and talk amongst themselves.

Sarah tightened her grip on Tommy's right hand and lifted her chin a fraction higher in defiance.

"Leave them," said a sepulchral voice from behind the squad. They fell silent, beginning to part as the man pressed through from where he had lingered in the doorway.

This newcomer was Tommy's "someone strong," Sarah realized, not the Mekuza leader as she had initially thought. At least she now knew how they had been able to find her and Tommy unerringly during the last week: Tommy had finally come to the attention of Chie, which meant it was time to leave. She smiled as she felt a gentle breeze ruffle her hair.

"You're too late," she informed the gathered men solemnly. She held her left hand out, palm towards the squad, warding them away with her hand as she concentrated with all her might on their destination.

The ring melted into vapor.

A strong wind blew into the church, screaming through the pews and ripping away Sarah's carefully drawn circle in the dust. The unseen magician paused in mid-push.

"Quick, you fools!" he screamed. The Mekuza rushed forward, their leader quickest of all as he headed for Sarah with an evil smile.

There was a blinding light, and the rebels were gone.

The Falconer shouldered his way to the front of milling, swearing men, turning cold eyes on the leader of their pack as he brushed past him. He paused to sniff their air delicately before crouching down to touch his hand to the dirt Sarah had sat on when she performed the rite.

"A good spell," he said slowly, aware that the Mekuza had stopped to watch him. "A strong one, with power behind it." He touched his hand to his lips, tasting the dust. "Either she did it, and used him, or he did it and used her."

He paused, sighing in satisfaction at the icy fear he felt from the men behind him. "I need whoever it was who can make such a spell."

He turned, just in time to catch the head Mekuzae as he fell gracelessly to the ground.

The Falconer sighed again, touching his fingertips to the dead man's eyelids and closing them gently. He pulled the poison dart from the man's neck with the ease of a long-practiced lover. "You failed me. You failed President Yang. Neither is acceptable."

He stood up and strode through the men, nearly shivering in delight at the terror he felt. "Now follow me back to the village. There are more clues hiding in the townspeople that sheltered those two."

He turned around and bared his teeth at the confused Mekuza squad. "And we can have some sport there, lads."

They followed him eagerly, but none came too close to the small, balding Falconer who strode tirelessly ahead of them, a mirthless smile fixed on his face.

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"Hello," said the man.

Sarah looked around in confusion. She had a dim memory of a rushing wind and a great light, and then she had found herself here, in this strange, dazzling place. It was a large and painfully bright room, huge and opulent with a high gilded ceiling. The sheer empty space contained by the ceiling was overwhelming after a lifetime of low-roofed huts and lodges.

Whatever she had expected to come of that portal spell, it had certainly not been this. Although, in all truthfulness, Sarah had never really given thought to what would happen. She had been so sure that the spell wouldn't work that she had never spared much time for the descriptions set forth in the grimoire Tommy had brought her.

She snuck a glance at Tommy, who was fidgeting as he looked around from beside her, eyes calculating as he scanned the room for small and portable valuables.

Looking from him to the man who had greeted her, she felt ashamed. His skin was bright and clean, and his garments, although foreign, were spotless and pressed. She spared a moment to marvel at the wondrous clothing that he wore, so different from that which she knew.

He wore a tight black shirt of some stretchy material, cut and sewn to uncover all his arms below the shoulders, and blue trousers of a rough material that went to his ankles and flared over bare feet instead of ballooning properly at the calves. He had crossed his bare arms as he waited for her to finish her inspection, high and inhumanly arched brows knit beneath a fall of short, blond hair that shone in the pure light of this new place.

Sarah wondered how she and Tommy looked to him with their baggy pantaloons and draped sleeves. She wished, looking at the stranger, to be free of the dirt that sank into her skin and stained all her clothing to the same filthy black. Next to him, she realized, they must have looked like pigs rooting in a sty.

His mocking gaze hinted that her thoughts had occurred to him some time ago. She felt embarrassment for a brief moment before her natural pride reasserted itself, fighting to be unleashed against the arrogant stranger. The man waited as she struggled, his casual posture suggesting that he was doing a great favor to the newcomers by allowing them the time to adjust to the delights around them. Delights that included him, or so his half-smile encouraged her to think.

"Where are we?" she said, examining the room. Murals painted with colors so bright they made her eyes water filled the walls, detailing a rich history that she wanted to read panel by panel until she could no longer tell each drawing apart. A plush carpet started just beyond her feet, tempting her to remove the rags that passed for shoes and let her feet feel its softness. A fire blazed merrily in the grate of the nearby black marble fireplace, casting shifting shapes of light on the man who lounged in a wine-colored armchair beside it. She tilted her head slightly, trying to read the title of the book that dangled from his hand. When he caught her looking at it, he carefully closed it and leaned backwards to place it on the other side of the chair, safely out of sight.

"This is not what I read about." She had expected cold stone, loose chickens, and drafty pits, not an elegant sitting room with a roaring fire and art that could make a master weep.

The man smiled carelessly, revealing pointed teeth that reminded her again of her situation. "You are in my realm," he said, swinging his legs down from the arm of the chair. He looked her up and down and she nearly cringed, remembering the look of the head Mekuzae. "Where you have wished to be, of course. Seldom do wishes turn out exactly like we plan them to." He smiled to himself at his private joke.

If he were who Sarah thought he was, then it wouldn't be a good idea to slap him. She held her tongue, considering what to do next.

"Who is the man with the funny hair?"

She started at Tommy's innocent question, but it was too late. The man uncurled from the armchair and jumped up, stretching his arms above his head. She had a brief glimpse of a strip of pale flesh between black shirt and blue pants before he walked towards them with fluid ease. The heels of his boots clicked on the floor as he stepped off the carpet, stopping just short of Sarah. She wrinkled her nose in annoyance, sure he had done so to intimidate her with his nearness and even more irritated to discover that he had succeeded.

"Little boy," he said with a winning smile that deepened when he saw Tommy squirm at the address, "I am the Goblin King."

She closed her eyes for a long moment, but when she opened them, he was still in front of her in that dazzling room. She had managed, against all odds, to open the portal to the realm of the Labyrinth and Jareth, the Goblin King.

Jareth blinked, looking straight at Tommy for the first time. He held out a hand sheathed in black leather, looking at the boy with an expression of wonder. Mercifully, Tommy held still as the hand lightly touched his cheek, looking at the Goblin King with solemn eyes. Sarah unclenched her fists in relief when the man dropped his hand without incident.

"You have brought me a gift, woman," Jareth said carefully, straightening after a quick glance at his gloves. They were still pristine despite their contact with Tommy's grubby face, Sarah noticed. "And I do not quite understand the pattern."

"His name is Thomas Camponello," she replied haughtily, stopping herself from gawking at his strange alien beauty as he gave her, too, a thorough second inspection. "He is a direct descendant of the mortal Sarah Williams."

Jareth hissed in a sharp intake of breath. "Then you have done me a favor indeed," he said, looking down at the boy with sudden proprietary interest. "Is he her great-grandson?"

She shrugged, having expected the question. "Sarah died over three hundred mortal years ago, Goblin King. This is the son of her son of her son to the seventh generation."

He looked at her again, clearly interested now. "A seventh son of Sarah, you bring me," he said thoughtfully. Before she could consider this reaction, the Goblin King had turned his knife-like attention to her, examining her with exquisite care.

"Why such a prize?" he demanded, ruthlessness in his eyes. "You know his value to me," he added as she opened her mouth. "What did you think to gain?"

"Sanctuary, and magic," she rushed out, leaving the rest unsaid for then. His sudden flare of anger sent a rising tide of worry flooding through her.

His eyes narrowed. "Sarah Williams," he said softly, looking at her face.

"Half right," she answered. "I'm not a Williams, but my name is Sarah." The weariness of her flight and the drain of the spell began to sap her strength, and she lurched on her feet.

Jareth grabbed her as she swayed, gripping her arm so tightly that she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out. "Hold still," he said irritably. "I can't work the spell unless you stay calm."

Sarah realized she was about to be sent back despite her plea for shelter. She had been wrong about many things, it seemed. Wrong about the ancient description of the goblin castle and its king, wrong about his love for the long-lost mortal--and most of all, wrong about gift of safe haven he would offer both the mortal's kin and the bringer.

Sarah closed her eyes, happy at least that Tommy would be safe, and braced herself for the journey back to the church and the Mekuza. It figured that only Jareth's quicksilver temper would hold through the years.

She cringed as a tingle swept over her skin, nearly weeping in relief as it disappeared before it could spread beyond her arm. His grip slackened abruptly. She cracked an eye open tentatively in surprise, only to see Jareth standing in front of her, a softened expression on her face.

"Appropriate," he said, touching her on the cheek as he had Tommy. "I would not have seen this happen, but here it is set in front of me for the taking."

She stared openly at him in confusion, which shifted to disbelief as he conjured a crystal and offered it to her.

Carefully, she took it from his hand. It glimmered softly in her palm, weightless, tickling her hand gently as it wobbled on the uneven surface. It was glowing and ethereal, spun of dream-stuff and magic, and she fought the urge to run and hide far away, where no one could find it but her. She cradled it closely, lost in the colors that seeped lazily across the surface, twisting in dazzling fractal oilslick patterns.

"It is you," he said when it became clear the crystal would not break. He favored her with a brilliant, genuine smile. Before she could bask in its warmth he soured, his face darkening with anger. She fought the urge to step away, forcing herself to stand her ground against his mercurial disdain.

"Yes, you are here again," he said, mouth twisted in a thin line of discontent. "But why are you here? Why didn't I know you were walking in the free air, waiting for me?" He bent down to look at her again, shaking his head when he couldn't find the confirmation he wanted in her confused gaze. "I should send you back and be done with it."

"What?" she demanded petulantly, feeling strength inside her rushing forth at the unfairness of it all. Were they safe here or not? What was the Goblin King talking about? "What's going on?"

"On the other hand, perhaps it has finally been enough," Jareth said to the crackling fire, his mood suddenly contemplative. "I must have done my penance in the long years, for you have finally returned."

He turned to her, eyes filled with a longing so strong she had to avert her eyes, seared by the raw emotion he had shown her. "You are back and my offer still stands."

The crystal imploded, leaving a delicate ring in her palm.

"Take it, and all I've promised before shall come to pass. Pledge yourself to me now and we can end the game here."

Numb with horror, she looked down at the ring and the fading crimson sparks that the crystal had showered her hand with when it had burst.

"Sarah, what's going on?" said Tommy from where both had forgotten him. "What is he talking about?"

"I don't know," Sarah wailed, unable to take her eyes from the gold filigree circle, deceptively heavy in her palm. She raked her mind over his words for some hidden meaning, utterly confused by his sudden shifts in mood and his final, bewildering offer.

She had never met the Goblin King before, despite what he claimed. She hadn't known for sure that he existed until the portal spell had transported her to what she presumed was the Underground. The ring filled her vision relentlessly, a silent warning to judge her actions. From the strength in his words, she doubted the misunderstanding could be explained once she made her choice. Yet remembering the men at the church, particularly the Mekuza captain and the magician, she wondered if the deception might be the safest path. She had no desire to return to a painful death.

The weight of Jareth's regard as he watched her was heavier than the ring to bear. She shivered as she felt his gaze sharpen.

"Well?" he drawled smoothly. The hollowness in his voice warned her against looking up but she couldn't stop herself.

He was living ice: tall, imposing, and radiating menace. He met her gaze and she fell into the event horizons of his frozen eyes, helpless against the naked fury she could feel rising all around them and focusing around his slim figure.

Underneath all her confusion and fear, something liquid coiled in her and began to pulse hotly in her blood at the arrogant display of power, filling her with slow weight that turned her attention inward. The feeling of remembrance grew, battering her mind as it froze to ice within her.

"Decide, mortal," Jareth said coldly. "You have had more than enough time to decide."

"She's only had five minutes!" Tommy burst out behind them.

"Much more than that," Jareth replied, eyes never moving from Sarah as she looked helplessly at the ring. "Lifetimes beyond your count," he finished, but did not elaborate.

"No," she said at last, deciding that he needed to know his mistake before it hurt her. "I haven't had years, and I need more time for such an important decision."

"What?" he roared, taking her chin between his fingers. He searched her face, tipping her head back roughly so that he could look into her hazel eyes.

Moments passed, ticked off by the swing of the grandfather clock in the corner. She was forced by her awkward position to consider his eerie sky-colored eyes and watch his mismatched pupils flickering as they passed over her face. What he saw in her, or what he sought, she couldn't fathom. Trapped in his grasp, she only wished for it to end.

"You don't remember," he said at last, glacially calm. "This cycle, you don't even remember who you are." He shook his head. "I had thought we had played the game poorly last time, Sarah Williams, but even I would not be so cruel." He paused, searching her face once more. "You do not know me," he at last bit out, releasing her and whirling away, pacing to the fireplace in dismay.

"You're the Goblin King," Sarah said carefully, afraid to correct his mistake once more.

Jareth stopped, throwing back his head and laughing bitterly. "I am indeed. You know enough to lead you here, and I will take that as the one encouragement it was meant. You knew enough to bring the boy." His eyes narrowed as he turned, laying one arm on the tall mantel as he leaned against it. "I think you are deliberately avoiding this choice, Sarah. It is time to end this."

The sense of memories coiling through her intensified to near-pain as she felt the pressure ascending, wrapping around her spine and crushing her rib cage as it climbed past her heart and inched its way to her mind. She gasped, stiffening, mouth frozen open mid-sentence.

"Yes," Jareth whispered, studying her from his place by the fire. "You may not remember yourself now, Sarah Williams, but you will soon." Firelight caught the planes of his face, wreathing him in shadow as he kept his vigil.

Tommy was still by where he waited, watching Sarah with quiet fear. She felt the lightest brush of his magic; heard him gasp as he recoiled.

"So cold," Tommy said through chattering teeth, and blurrily she saw the Goblin King turn with raised eyebrows to consider Tommy as he fought for control, bruised by the backlash of whatever was attacking her.

Bitter frost wrapped her throat and caught her breath, her eyes glazing as the pressure rose the last few inches of its journey.

Then it was gone, shocking in its lightning-quick disappearance. She looked up to see Jareth directly in front of her, twirling a crystal on his palm with disdain and looking anywhere but at her.

Her vision was colorless; the Goblin King was all angles and sharp planes, ruthless beauty and curious vulnerability. Looking at him, she could almost see the precipice he hung over and contemplated in the depths of the crystal. Something deep and dark within her shifted, and her lips shaped words before she even knew what she was saying.

"You have no power over me."

As she said it, she knew it was true.

Jareth stared at her for one long, cold moment before clenching his fist, shattering the crystal and grinding the fragments into the leather with a sound like cracking bones.

"So be it, Sarah," the Goblin King said slowly, carefully. "But I will not lose you again." He turned his fist and opened it, letting the shards drop to the ground. They clattered to the floor like broken wind chimes.

Sarah stumbled as he came for her, and the world fled into darkness.

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Author's notes: 

Version two uploaded 12/14/03--many thanks to dawn1 and thehoodedbanana for the reviews that led me to revise the intro

Beta'd by songbird, who responded to my call for a beta with amazing speed. Special thanks to Stormchild, who set this idea in motion about two months with her challenge calling for a reincarnation story.

And a big fat apology to readers who thought I was gone until January. I broke my own first rule of writing with this one: never start one story when another is half-done. But hiatus is...almost...like done, so I figured I was safe. (Right? _Right?_) In the meantime, this'll be a short break for me.

I welcome all criticism freely. If something offends your neurotic grammar or plot instincts, **tell me** and you will make my day. I throw this stuff out here in the hopes of receiving scathing reviews that'll improve my next try.


	2. The Art of Remembering

**The End of Sleep**

by Alison Harvey

Disclaimer: Characters from the movie Labyrinth belong to Henson & Co. All else is mine.

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_Cleopatra:_

Courteous lord, one word.  
Sir, you and I must part, but that's not it:  
Sir, you and I have lov'd, but there's not it;  
That you know well: something it is I would,  
O! my oblivion is a very Antony,  
And I am all forgotten.

_--Antony and Cleopatra_ (I.iii.106-111)

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Chapter 2: The Art of Remembering

Waking up was difficult.

Sarah and Tommy used to give each other tours of ruined buildings on their wild runs around the country, making up stories of who had lived there and what they had used each strange machine for. They would hold up rotting dresses and suits and laugh, raid long-abandoned kitchens for still-edible stored mixes or canned foods. Sarah had taught Tommy about the sickness that came from eating what was in the odd-shaped, distorted cans. And in return, he had found the object.

Glass, she had guessed. With his instinct for truth Tommy had explained to her that the beautiful unfinished half-sphere, rough from only the barest of polishing, was crystal. Glass had little lead, if any; crystal had more, giving it the sounds of bells when it broke and a strange fine heaviness when lifted. The sphere had been cut in half as a paperweight of sorts. Rather than being etched and cut, someone had preserved it from the glassblower's factories. The top half looked like molten glass frozen in time. It was thick and wavy and nearly impossible to see through, turning Tommy's ragged overcoat--it had been the dead of winter--into a blur of muddy olive green.

She had been forced to leave it behind on a heap of collapsed furniture, reluctance tempered by practicality. Still, the mention of crystal had stirred something within her, made her remember a half-story about another land with a sky of brilliant orange. After their next escape from the attentive Mekuzae she had started to look for gateway spells.

President Chie forbade magic, like old technology, in Eamerica. Of course, Chie forbade everything remotely useful or good, so that hardly made a difference. But magic was a special province of the state, to be hoarded by the presidential magicians as another tool. Chie wanted to keep herself safe as long as possible, and her quintet of pet magicians--no one knew what hold she had over them, but most suspected hostage family members--had thwarted dozens of riots, civil rebellions, coups and assassination plots.

Sarah's parents had been killed in the periodic cleaning of treachery ten years back. She hardly remembered more than the way her mother's sleeve draped as she reached over to her younger self, and the thick smell of her father's cigarettes. She remembered the needles and the too high laughs of the parties more than well enough. Her parents had been too young for the unexpected child. They had sheltered her and let her grow wild until her eighth year, then set her free with their deaths. Kinder, stronger people had tended her then, until she had become a liability and had been pushed towards the life of a nomad, poking through odd technological rubbish in the hopes of selling it to the next person. It'd been more profitable to sell it to the rebels; he ones who sought to restore the Golden Age before the plague.

She had found Tommy on her trek back from scouring the abandoned ports on the Gulf of Mexico, huddled in a cluster of shacks somewhere near old Virginia. He could count his genealogy back seven generations, though none were distinguished, to Sarah Williams, an occultist whose works were prized among the rebels for their hints and recipes of small magics. He had insisted on becoming her companion, and his odd instincts and ancient blood had served them more than once. Sarah had been oddly compelled to keep him close, more drawn to him than any other person she'd run into in the living hell that was her country.

She had become prominent among the rebels for protecting him: Tommy had been stalked for reasons both of ancestry and of power. Together the pair were a prize, although she had been startled to realize how much more the magicians wanted Tommy. When they had started hunting him in earnest, she had fled with him to their chains of self-prepared safe houses, abandoning all plans of a fresh civil war in the hopes of making it to Canada or California. The two had shed the small, traceable mechanics they had unearthed, the ones that had kept them safe and clean, and ran with the Mekuzae on their heels and Sarah's nose buried in the grimoire that told of access to the otherworld. Stolen pages from the Williams book on the Underground gave her the rest.

Now she was here, and awake, and there was a supernatural being who claimed she was Sarah Williams.

Worse still, she knew it was true.

She kept her eyes shut, fighting the nausea caused by two sets of different memories dueling in her mind for prominence.

)/("It's crystal," Tommy said, holding out the glassy chunk. She took it cautiously, holding it in her hands like something precious to be admired. She hadn't seen something so fine since they'd poled a raft to the island off Cape Cod and wandered through forgotten summerhouses.

"It's so beautiful," Sarah murmured, cradling it gently. Something hammered at her memory, shoved to get in, but she couldn't get it yet. She held it and waited. A flash of orange from the crimson struck the piece and shone, turning each facet into a miniature glowing sun.

And she realized how she could protect Tommy from the next attack.)/(

Sarah gasped for air, helpless to stop the next upwelling of her mind.

(("Just a crystal, nothing more," whispered a voice of silk and shadows.

And Sarah Williams woke up in her empty house, punching the button on her bedside clock. She was unsurprised to see that it was three-seventeen in the morning.

Sighing, she turned on the lamp with a nudge and picked up the notebook on the nightstand. Flipping to the back of the densely scrawled-upon pages, she grabbed a chewed pencil from the nightstand and began to write. The cramped letters formed a name that she remembered even after twenty years.

_The Goblin King can be cruel and capricious_, she wrote, then stopped, trying to remember what the dream had said to her.))

That was not her life. And yet with the viewing, she knew that it was. It had already become a part of her past. She had written _Of The Underground_, could quote whole passages by heart, explain the twists and turns of the Labyrinth…

((Her face hidden from the sun under a floppy straw hat, Sarah clipped the last twig off the outside of the hedge.

"It's done," she said happily to the empty grounds. "Finally."

The notebook was leather now, the pen an expensive Swiss construction. Sarah gathered them up with an aged hand and pushed her hat back to dangle behind her from the string at her neck. She looked at the restored hedge maze in front of her. Her husband had helped her cut away the worst of the debris, shaking his head when she refused to hire an experienced gardener. But the last few weeks of clipping and pruning had been her own private affair.

She walked into the maze, having memorized the path to the center. There was a jaunty spring in her step that belied her seventy-odd years.

After all, she had nearly finished the work of her life. The book would soon be complete. Still, she wished she might see the Goblin King one last time.))

Judging from the lack of memories of a second encounter, Sarah realized that her last wish had never been fulfilled. She forbade herself from seeing her past time in the Labyrinth, although images of a dank maze and a decrepit castle swam before her eyes. And companions as well, something the books had never said. There had been a knight, and a beast…

((Sir Didymus, valiant fox, and his bearer, Ambrosius the Brave. Ludo, who sang to rocks and made them dance.))

…and a gardener who had both betrayed and succored her, defying his liege to bring her safely to her brother.

((Hoggle, my friend,)) her mind supplied with warm enthusiasm. It felt like a double echo--even the words sounder older and strangely accented. She held them both in one head, but they were two separate people.

Last of all, Jareth, the Goblin King. ((My adversary, I defeated him despite his tricks and promises,)) that other voice chimed, stubborn and victorious.

((The snowy owl flew from its perch to the tree outside the entrance to the overgrown maze.

"Do you like it, Ginevre?" Sarah called to the owl. "I do." She turned to the old mansion, then to her assistant. "We'll take it at sixty thousand under the asking price. Let me know when I need to sign."))

_Shut up shut up shut up_, she thought, dizzy from the feeling of being stretched into different lives.

Mercifully, no new revelations stirred. She felt curiously empty without that second set of feelings but grateful there were no more memories of the Goblin King.

Other than those of last night, of course. Jareth, greeting her. Jareth, telling her who she was, spelling her somehow to remember. Jareth, offering her a red-gold ring that shone like fire in her hand, telling her she had known him for centuries.

If he was right about her being Sarah Williams, it was possible that he was right about all the rest. That, above all else, terrified her.

Realizing she could never go back to sleep on that thought, Sarah opened her eyes. For a moment, she thought she was back in the memory of Tommy showing her the crystal; everything was blurred and distorted as if seen through old, wavy glass. She blinked rapidly and her eyes cleared. Hastily she pushed at sheets and sat up, looking around at the room as her vision sharpened.

The room was large, with pale blue walls and delicate red-stained wood furniture. In the corner was an oval standing mirror, tilted away from the bed to show a view of the blank ceiling. There was a large window to her right, covered with heavy draperies. No air or light came through the thick fabric, making it impossible to tell what time of day it was.

Instead, light came from a simple globe hanging from the ceiling that had brightened when she sat up. There were large double doors opposite to the foot of the bed, and a cushioned bench right beside it. To her left was a single door, open a crack. To the right was a nightstand, holding an empty mug and a plate with some crumbs. Beside it was a cushioned chair pulled close enough to the bed to touch. It prompted uncomfortable thoughts.

She looked down, taking in the oversized nightgown she wore and deciding it was best not to think about how she had ended up in it. Pulling her legs out from the sheets and kicking away the coverlet, she let her legs dangle from the tall bed as she slid onto the cool wood floor. Standing up brought a rush of blood to her head, darkening the corners of her vision. Alarmed, she sat down in the chair.

The soft fabric was warm beneath her bare legs, as if someone had vacated it recently. Surprised, she looked again at the empty plate and mug, realizing that she had had a visitor who had also eaten and drank while watching over her sleep. The uneasiness of earlier came back, stronger this time.

The double doors creaked. Sarah snapped her attention to the widening gap with frightened attention, adrenaline flooding her.

A short creature walked in, visibly double-taking when he saw the empty bed. His gaze immediately traveled to the chair, and he exhaled loudly.

"Whew. I thought you'd gone missing. He'd've had my head for that."

Sarah gaped at the stocky dwarf. Something was wrong about what he had said, not compatible with whom her heart told her he was. The voices in her head began to clamor.

"Hoggle?"

"You remember me!" he exclaimed, running over to her. "I was hoping you would, but no one knew for sure who you'd be when you woke up."

She crouched down to hug him, smiling so broadly she thought she might crack her face. There was still something different, but she couldn't tell what it was. And even if it was different, it was still familiar. "I never thought I'd see you again."

He pulled away to look at her critically. "You're different this time around, that's for sure, but not by much. I'm glad you didn't change."

"So you know?" she said hesitantly. If he knew, then he'd conveniently forgotten while helping her in the Labyrinth. She now understood the purpose of the ballroom. In the past, she had dismissed it as another trick to keep her from leaving. Now she recognized it as a delaying tactic, another chance to jog her memories and make her wake up from whatever amnesia she had kept.

She had no idea why she had not found on her own about her previous lives. Fantastic as the story was, she was forced to believe it. There wasn't another explanation for her sudden remembrance of a whole second life. From what she knew of the Goblin King, he had no reason to inflict a spell on her to make her believe that. He twisted the truth--and the rules--but always hesitated from speaking an outright lie.

She firmly shoved the more personal details of Jareth's explanation into a large mental box marked "Later." Next century wouldn't be soon enough.

Hoggle shrugged, embarrassed. The move tugged the crisp folds of material around his shoulders, pulling the garment out of place. "We all know. We weren't allowed to tell you the first time, we were. Helping you was nothing compared with what he threatened if you'd found out. He already knew you didn't remember him then."

She softened. Of course there was a reason. Suspicion lingered, then drifted away. She was more interested in what her friend was wearing.

Hoggle caught her glance at his peculiar new clothing and blushed, if such a thing was possible beneath his ruddy skin. "You like it?"

She took a step back and surveyed the dark grey double-breasted suit. His skullcap was gone, revealing a balding head with neat but sparse hair. Instead of jewels, an old-fashioned watch-fob dangled from his belt. The pants were slightly too long. Underneath them, she could see expensive-looking and highly polished black shoes.

The effect was both ridiculous and intriguing, but she knew how much it would hurt his feelings to admit the former.

"It's different," she said carefully. "What do you need to dress up for?"

Hoggle stared at her for a moment, then laughed. "I'm not dressed up," he explained. "This is what I wear everyday. The Labyrinth doesn't need gardeners now. His Majesty told me I could leave, or try something new."

"What is it that you do?" she asked, curious.

"Investment banking," he told her quietly, drawing himself up a little taller.

She gaped. Only after she considered what her shock must appear to Hoggle did she push

herself back into the chair.

"It's very important here, you know," he said quickly. "Things change slowly here, but as soon as the stock market arrived Underground, I knew I wanted to work with it."

She tried a different tack, still trying to picture Hoggle as a ruthless financier cutting deals between corporations and poring over financial records. It was easier to imagine than she'd expected, but still funny. To stop from giggling, knowing what it would do to his pride, she decided to ask more. The idea that the Goblin Castle could have a stock market was intriguing and downright mind-boggling. "So how long ago did the market arrive?"

Hoggle frowned as he tried to remember, tilting his head to the side in a look of confusion she remembered from her first time through the Labyrinth. "Funny, that. I never really noticed. After the first companies formed. Antiron Production, Illusion Sea Faerite, the rest of them. That's when we started to sell the shares, you know."

Hoggle had a somewhat dubious moral system--discounting earned loyalty--and a magpie-like greed for shiny objects, but he was not a fool. Sarah knew that he had dangled that particular bit of information in front of her in hopes of distracting her from the shadow that haunted the room. The annoyingly blond, annoyingly suave Goblin King.

Both Sarahs clashed in her mind when she thought about the Goblin King, creating a confusing mess of factual and emotional data that left her dumbstruck while her mind struggled to sort it all out. She was scared of what she remembered and had learned about the Goblin King.

What terrified her, though, was what Jareth had told Tommy when they had arrived in the Labyrinth. Cycles? Lifetimes? None of that sounded like he was referring to her past time in the Labyrinth.

Even the fact she remembered the complete life of Sarah Williams was beginning to drive her crazy. Who was this other person in her head? Why was the Goblin King acting like this? Jareth owed her an explanation, if she ever stuck around long enough to listen to it. All they needed was a few years' protection from Chie, enough time to gain the magic that could hide her safely.

Sarah had once dreamed of permanent asylum in some tiny part of the Goblin King's lands. She remembered the vast lands stretching beyond the Labyrinth itself, rolling red dust under a glassy sky. She had thought that she could make a life in this alien place. Now, after the Goblin King's frighteningly urgent offer, she knew she had to return. Jareth wanted more than Tommy, and she had never expected anything else to be on the table.

She ignored the pricking guilt when she thought of Tommy. He was meant to be here and guilt had no place in knowing that by sending them over she was sending him here permanently.

Changelings had no place in the world Chie was building. He was safer here with Jareth, even if Jareth had a new and different agenda.

Sarah didn't want to think about _him_ right now. Maybe, she realized, Hoggle hadn't been distracting her from the Goblin King for Jareth's sake, but her own. The thought prompted a faint smile, which encouraged Hoggle's history lesson.

"We haven't had a mortal in a long time. Do you know anything about the stock market? In the beginning the Labyrinth had the advantage because we'd ask the runners questions, but it's been so long the others have all caught up."

Sarah considered this, using it as a chance to test her new memory. Sarah Williams remembered her father reading the paper and cursing the daily reports as this stock or that did poorly. Sarah Tomolino remembered reading a very old paper once in a safe house that documented the 50-year anniversary of the Great Crash of 2023.

"They're gone now."

Hoggle blinked. "How long ago?"

"About a hundred years, I think."

Hoggle looked down at his fingers and mumbled a few things, drawing each hand into a slow fist before opening it one finger at a time. She thought she saw the number fifty added several times, but wasn't sure.

Her head felt swollen and heavy, too full from the effort of holding two distinct personalities. She had once read--one of her, anyway--that sleeping allowed a mind to sort out a lot of information quickly. How long would she need to sleep before she became one person?

Both memory-Sarahs laughed inside her head.

Hoggle's fingers and presumably his thoughts had finished their frantic calculations. "So we're fine then."

"What?" she asked, and could have sworn she heard a dual tone. Hoggle gave her a strange look.

"We're about one hundred years behind the Aboveground, which means nothing strange has happened."

Still confused, she prodded him. "What do you mean by far behind? And why would something strange happen?"

He shrugged. "Takes a while for human ideas to come across into our world and be changed into magic. When antiron was found that made the time speed up a bit. When you visited we were maybe about three hundred years behind in ideas, I think, but antiron keeps us a bit closer."

He had only answered one of the two questions, but she had to follow it up. "Antiron?"

"Anti-iron. It doesn't block magic, but you can use it like iron."

She opened her mouth to ask if iron did, then closed it. A wisp of thought drifted up, offered by some part of her mind, explaining that iron ore was the most effective way to block magic, and could be deadly to those who drew on magic often.

Hoggle had clearly offered the information to bait her into another tangential discussion, and she wasn't about to let him succeed. She tried to figure out what to do before he could start an explanation. Fortunately, her stomach rumbled.

"Hoggle, would there be anything to eat around here?"

The dwarf brightened. He ran a hand through the sparse, wiry hair on his head, smoothing it down. "I can show you the dining room. I'm s'posed to give you a quick tour so you don't get lost. Follow me."

She was about to do so when she thought to look down at her nightdress. "Uh, Hoggle, I can't go out in these clothes."

He turned to look. "I was…that is to say, there's a dressing gown on the door. And slippers under the table. They're for you until we can get you clothes."

"What happened to my old ones?"

Hoggle grunted. "Gave 'em to the kitchen maids for rags, but they refused. They went on the rubbish heap this morning with the boy's."

"Tommy!" she said, realizing what she'd missed. "Is he all right? What happened to him? Where is he?" She didn't bother to mourn her clothes, although she wasn't happy to learn this was all she had in the meantime.

Hoggle held his hands up to fend off the barrage of questions. "He's fine, Sarah. He's in the dining room as well, eating as fast as the cook can bring it out."

She calmed down somewhat and looked around. Sure enough, by the side of the door, was a gleaming brass hook holding up a garment. She took the deep blue fabric in her hand, surprised at its soft feel, and shook it out to reveal a floor-length silk dressing gown embroidered with a silvery geometric pattern of overlapping rectangles and triangles. The sleeves were long, flopping over her wrists, but it tied securely around her waist with more than enough fabric to spare. The slippers were the same dark blue and at first looked too wide and too long for her. As she put them on, however, they rapidly shrank until they fit snugly from heel to toe. It was a shame the gown hadn't done the same, but she was happier with the baggier fit. No doubt a self-fitting gown would have its own ideas on what would suit her best.

She turned to find Hoggle waiting impatiently by the door.

"Done primping yet?" he asked gruffly, but she could tell he wasn't irritated.

"Yes," she said with a smile, smoothing down the edge of the robe. "Anytime you're ready."

Hoggle pushed open the double doors, one door for each hand, and graciously held one door for her. Cautiously, Sarah stepped through.

She was immediately reminded again of her trip with Tommy through the summerhouses. The hallway they stepped into was long, stretching down and to her right with at least ten doors on either side. At the far end she could see a landing, and the curving rail of what she guessed was a staircase.

As she followed Hoggle down the hallway, she looked from side to side at the doors. The first was dark mahogany, with a sculpted glass doorknob shaped like a gathering of woodland creatures. She bent down, marveling at the delicate fawn running ahead of the pack.

"Don't touch," Hoggle warned, and she snatched her hand away. Straightening, she continued, past painted doors and unfinished doors, doors with paneling and doors with scrollwork and one beautiful door that seemed to be entirely made out of a red gemstone. It was scored with deep, angular runes that spoiled the careful faceting of the edges. She paused in front of this one for a moment, then continued past marble, granite with stained glass panels and one arched door made of sandstone, small bits of orange sand swirling in the air around it. Hoggle looked back over his shoulder disapprovingly, and she walked faster to the plain wooden spiral staircase.

They descended down what seemed a hundred steps, until Sarah was dizzy with the twists and turns. Suddenly, Hoggle stopped; Sarah paused, mid-step, to keep from running into him.

"Always forget where it is," he said. "Mighta passed it."

She thought of climbing back up the steep steps and sincerely hoped they hadn't missed whatever it was he was looking for.

Hoggle poked at the center pole of the staircase. Looking at it, Sarah was surprised to realize it was a living tree. "Here it is," he said, fumbling around between the rough gray scales of bark.

There was a click, and a small door swung inward into a brightly lit room. He scrambled through. Ducking her head and bending her knees, Sarah clambered in after him. Her nightdress snagged on the bark, stopping her. Sighing, she reached behind her and gently tugged. There was a tearing sound and then it came free. She winced as she saw a small patch of fabric had been ripped from the hem. As she turned around to step out and retrieve the missing piece, the door closed,

"Fine," she said to the now-seamless wall. She turned around to find Hoggle at the far end of the room, looking intently at the only object in this new, empty room: a painting. Wondering why Hoggle had brought her to a room without exits, she moved to join him by the painting. It was hung at his eye level. Bending down, Sarah examined it.

It was pretty, though hardly a masterpiece. Hard, dry-brushed strokes depicted a still life of three objects: a key, a feather and a pomegranate, the last painted with special attention to the detailing of the hundreds of exposed seeds. Each had a healthy glow, nestled in the ripe red flesh of the cut fruit. One seed had already come loose from the pomegranate and lay temptingly on the flat surface of the painted table. Sarah's stomach growled again as she looked at it.

Hoggle reached up and touched the seed.

Vines burst from the painting with a harsh ripping sound, growing out of the table, curling out of the feather and through the key. Each pomegranate seed nurtured a tendril that waved in the light before shoving itself out to reveal the fat fully-grown vine beyond. Then each moved up and out towards the watchers.

Sarah backed away, startled. Hoggle stayed where he was, looking bored.

The vines continued from the painting where they had hidden, coiling up and around themselves and the painting as they streamed up towards the ceiling. The writhing ceased abruptly, unnerving in its stillness. Gradually Sarah began to see a pattern in their weaving: the disturbing mass of green formed an archway. The vines that covered the arch fell down nearly straight to the ground, although they still appeared to be tangled and knotted together.

"Go on," Hoggle said. "They were just showing off, them. Don't get much company around here."

She swallowed a desperate laugh, remembering the False Alarms and what had lurked behind them, and looked at the curtain in front of her. Reaching one hand out tentatively, she touched the nearest vine. It was cool to the touch and felt rubbery, snakelike. She stepped forward, closer to them, and tried not to think about how easily they could come to life and wring her neck.

She had no choice but to trust Hoggle. Taking a deep breath, she ducked through the vines, trying hard not to let the serpentine strands brush her face. The vines went back further than she thought, and she found herself in a ghostly fall of ropelike strands swaying in some unfelt breeze.

Just before she could start to panic in the gloom, she realized that there was light ahead, and heard the high sound of a boy singing. _Tommy_. She pushed through the last vines, shrugging off their lingering caress with a quick shake, and stepped through to the other side.

The singing stopped abruptly. Forcing her eyes open against the bright light, Sarah saw she'd entered a plain room with a small, intimate triangular table and three chairs. To her relief, Tommy perched in one chair, reaching for a sandwich, one of three or four scattered on a huge platter. He began wolfing it down as she watched, looking up in mid-bite to grin at her through a mouthful of bread and meat.

"Hi Sarah." He took bites from the sandwich between words. "Gonna eat?" He looked down at the platter and then looked up again sheepishly. "'Fraid there's not much left."

Tommy grabbed at a glass in front of him, filled with a blue liquid, and took a long drink. When he swallowed, he grinned again with a navy moustache. "Gotta hurry. It's good."

The smell reached her then, and she hungrily went to sit down at the table, snagging the platter from where it rested in front of Tommy. "No more for you. You haven't been asleep for..." she trailed off, realizing she didn't know how long.

"...two days," the boy finished cheekily. "When you get sick you don't do it half good. We were worried about you."

She gave him an arch look that melted into satisfaction with the first bite of what tasted like the best ham-and-cheese sandwich of her life. "And what have you been doing for those two days?"

Tommy shrugged in the frustrating universal manner of twelve-year-old boys. "Y'know. Stuff." He looked over her shoulder. "Hi Hoggle."

She turned around happily, glad that he'd at last made it through.

"I wish you could have warned me, Hoggle," she said lightly. "When those vines first started growing I thought you'd accidentally triggered a trap!" The food relaxed her, and a sip of the milky white liquid that had appeared in her glass went quickly to her head.

Hoggle smiled. "I didn't know that was going to happen, actually. You made it different."

"What do you mean?" She put the rest of the sandwich down, curious.

"Let me try," Tommy said eagerly.

Hoggle nodded.

What would Tommy know about it? She began to wonder what had happened in the past two days while she'd slept. Hopefully, from what she saw between her adopted brother and her friend, Hoggle had entertained him.

"Well," Tommy began, "The magic here's like water. It's still magic, but it shapes itself to you, trying to impress you or scare you or serve you. So what Hoggle's saying is that he didn't know the door would be like that 'cause he didn't know how it'd react to you."

Hoggle nodded, looking pleased at the answer. "Everything around you is a bit of a reflection of your own thoughts," he offered.

She picked up her sandwich again and took a bite thoughtfully, chewing slowly. "So we can change things?"

"Yeah, you can change things," Hoggle said, sending a warning look at Tommy that she missed. "But not everything. You see…"

Hoggle trailed off. Before she could prompt him to finish, Tommy broke in.

"Hi, Jareth!"

"What Hoggle means," said the Goblin King, "is that the magic of this place is ultimately mine to command."

Sarah paused in mid-bite. She forced herself to finish chewing and swallow the tasteless food before turning as casually as she could to face the direction of the voice.

The Goblin King wore a faded blue shirt over even more faded and frayed blue jeans. The jeans nearly covered his shoeless feet, but his bare arms did nothing to hide the cream gloves on his hands. A red scarf like draped a cascade of lace around his throat; loose red bracelets mimicked the piping of the wardrobe she had once associated with him...perhaps of an elaborate cuffed shirt. Recognizing some of

Jareth's older flamboyance, she relaxed a tiny bit. That Jareth, at least, she knew how to best.

She didn't know how to speak, or what to say. Something strong pulsed through her, but she didn't trust it to be love, fear or hate. It was dark and bitter and gripped her tightly no matter how she tried to pry it off. She had loved this man, and hated him. She had

wanted him and run away from him and ran back to him and been torn from his hands by her aunt's guards, by the priest, by her friends, by thousands of nameless faces that nonetheless had shape and associations and _meaning_, damn them, in her life.

And then she realized what was in the stream of memories that had hit her and leaned down to vomit on the shining floor. She heaved until her empty stomach only gave up dry retches. Memories beyond what either Sarah could have known retreated, swirling just out of her mental sight...but not far enough to disappear. She refused to explore what strange possibilities had suddenly opened, turning away from them and withdrawing into the person she knew best of all: Sarah.

A light touch on her shoulder make her look up from her palms, pressed against her face to block the light. She saw Jareth, bending over her in concern. A cool cloth pressed against her mouth and was removed, taking with it the taste of slick, sour bile.

"You have not remembered it all yet."

"I hate you," she spat out. "I don't care if I am Sarah! I don't want to be her! I want to be me! I don't want to remember this!"

She was now on her feet, and to her amazement Jareth backed away from her upraised hand.

Then she saw the red palm print on his cheek.

She didn't remember slapping him.

"Get away from her," Hoggle said angrily, holding his ground with his liege. "She needed time, I told you. You could have least explained why you knew her and what you did!"

In the middle of this, she realized who he reminded her of, why he didn't seem quite like the friend she remembered from long talks in the mirror. "And Didymus, Ludo? What happened to them?" she asked, knowing how absurd her timing was.

He looked away from Jareth, placidly waiting with murder on his face.

"Gone," Hoggle said curtly. "They had no place or wish to have one in this world. They faded as the Labyrinth changed."

"But some bits of them live in you," she said, reading the pain on his open face.

"They do in all of us," Jareth said, his mouth a thin, bitter line. "But perhaps it is Hoggle who has changed the most."

She forced herself to look at the man who was not human, pushing the pain it caused away. She read grief on his face, too, and wondered what the slow change had cost the king.

"Let me go back to who and what I was," Sarah pleaded as her anger faded away. Hoggle's grief was written too plain across his honest features. Near him, Jareth looked on impassively. She felt desperately out of place in the alien land. "I was happy in my life. Please send me back. You can undo this, I know."

Jareth narrowed his eyes. "And Tommy? You would have let him die rather than remember who you were?"

In the face of that cold assertion, she could say nothing. Of course she would have not let him die. He was everything to her.

"That's right," Jareth said, watching her hungrily. Hoggle's blunt presence between the two of them seemed the only thing that stopped him from reaching out to her again, although it was clear that the moment he left, that protection would be gone. "He was only your way into my realm. Sarah's blood. Your blood." He shook his head, the moment that had set adrenaline spiking suddenly gone. "If you only knew that your blood would have called me that much faster."

"But why!" she protested, again with that strange feeling of the older Sarah speaking through her. "Why am I back? Why this second life? I had a good life. I had a husband, a son, and a grandson. I had nephews and nieces and a comfortable living as a writer. I had a few spells and a major work on the Labyrinth. Why was I brought back to this broken, crippled world?" As she heard her own words, she could feel the history settling down in her mind, memories slotting into place in the old-young amalgam she was becoming. Blocking out the clamor of voices, it seemed, had dimmed the Sarahs in her mind to murmurs that offered helpful suggestions as one, not apart.

"I'm not sure why you don't remember, but I can only imagine why it hasn't happened yet. This is not your second life. The number is closer to thirty-two. I have lost count over the years I have sought you."

"You're lying," she denied flatly, chilled by the clear tone and open gaze that implied otherwise.

"I cannot lie," he said with a shrug of elegant shoulders. "And that was no twist of truth. You have been mine for nearly a thousand years, and I will not let you go."

"That's not quite honest," Hoggle said.

Jareth hissed slightly. Hoggle flinched, but continued. "He's known you for a thousand years, but you haven't been his."

"Is that true?" she demanded, watching Jareth closely.

"Yes," was his toneless reply. "You were mine, to be mine, but it has never been fulfilled." He shot a venomous glance at Hoggle, his gloved hands twisting against each other. A shimmer of light from a half-formed crystal filled the room before it was ruthlessly crushed by black leather.

"A thousand years?" she said in disbelief, her voice cracking on the last word as she realized what he meant. She looked at Hoggle, panicked, but he was studying the floorboards.

Jareth sighed, extending his hand. She stared at his leather-clad palm in a panic, thinking he meant to give her the ring again. "It was something I had planned to broach more carefully," he admitted, a stinging rebuke in his tone for Hoggle's blunt declaration. What the dwarf had forced him to admit clearly irritated him. A quick look at the spare table seemed to settle him. "Perhaps we could discuss this over dinner?"

She stared at him, still in shock over his words.

"Do try not to faint again," he said mildly, his hand still waiting for hers. "Concussions can lead to memory loss, you know."

His voice sharpened when it was clear she was still frozen. "This stubbornness does not become you. You have not eaten in some time. Your Tommy is waiting for us at the table. If you refuse to come I will spell you into eating."

She eyed his hand with distaste, not responding to his threat. With a sigh, Jareth dropped his hand. "Hoggle, leave us. Sed Cannick is waiting in the drawing room." The dwarf brightened, but his toothy grin faded as he looked quickly to Sarah. She shook her head, imperceptibly, motioning with the briefest flick of her finger that he should leave. With one last apologetic glance over his shoulder, Hoggle left.

She felt the sense of protection ebbing with each step, but was glad to distract Jareth from Hoggle's earlier actions. Besides, Tommy was still in the room.

"Still loyal after all these years," Jareth murmured. "You do have quite the ability to appropriate my servants." He turned to the table where Tommy was sitting quietly, poking at something on his palm.

"Little one," he said casually. "Will you take a message to Catsqueak the goblin? The guard who showed you around the castle yesterday?"

Sarah felt real panic well up within her, but Tommy refused to meet her gaze. He stood up, his eyes bright. "Sure, Jareth."

The Goblin King held out a crystal, which Tommy dutifully took. "It will show you the way to the barracks," Jareth explained, "and will tell you if you have taken the wrong turn. It also contains my message. He will know how to read it."

"Neat," the boy said eagerly. "Will you show me how to put two things together like that next?"

"What?" Sarah burst out, too horrified to keep silent. "What is he teaching you?"

Jareth smiled. "Magic."

"It's fun," Tommy offered, before leaving through the vine-door.

She turned to Jareth, indignant. "How is that possible?"

His answer took the wind out of her sails. "Toby, I believe."

She could believe it, too. Toby had always been different after the Labyrinth. It was no stretch to realize that it must have changed him.

She quieted, studying the polished, gleaming floor.

"Sarah," said the Goblin King, then stopped. He carefully took her arm in a gloved hand, looking at the robe as he did so. "I see you found something appropriate to wear while exploring," he commented, clearly amused. She bristled, not understanding the source of the humor. "Please, sit down and eat," he said, leading her to the table. A gesture of his hand brought a goblin dressed in a neat black uniform, who looked at Sarah, then the Goblin King, and then scurried through a half-door she'd missed in her first inspection of the room.

The goblin-waiter returned a moment later with a silver tray. Pausing in front of Sarah, he set out a bowl of broth and a large piece of dark, steaming bread. Another scurry brought her another glass of the milky liquid she'd drank earlier, but heated. A third and final silent visit left the Goblin King with a small plate filled with green slivers and a crystal wineglass filled with red wine.

She looked from his plate to hers. "Yours looks better," she said quietly, trying to break the silence she could feel settling around them uncomfortably.

Jareth responded with a slight smile. "I wasn't the one who fell asleep for two days and then vomited up whatever little she had left in her stomach."

He had a point. She supped the broth slowly, pausing to nibble on the bread. Jareth used both knife and fork to cut his food into even smaller bites, washing them down with long sips of the wine. He watched what she ate intently, clearly making sure she ate everything. Sarah realized he hadn't been joking earlier about spelling her into eating, and began using the bread to mop up the last drops of broth clinging to the side of the bowl. Some of the tension drained from his expression when she put her empty glass down beside an empty bowl and eyed his half-full wine glass enviously.

Lots of alcohol was a possible solution to the situation, but it appeared Jareth had already anticipated that.

He slid his chair back and offered his hand. Ignoring it, she slowly stood up, pushing herself away from the table in an effort to prevent any new conversation.

Perhaps guessing this, he was silent as he guided her to an empty wall. At the last minute she saw the flickering, wavering outline of a door, and walked through. The illusion of the wall was velvety against her skin as she passed under it, fading away before she could feel smothered.

She recognized, with a start, the room she had landed in the night before. It was warm, with a blazing fire. The heat was pleasantly soothing, enough so that she allowed herself to be directed without protest to the same chair she had seen him in the night before.

"I thought," he said, settling himself on the marble hearth, "that I would give you the opportunity to ask some questions. It has occurred to me that you might have a few, given my actions the night before."

As an apology, it wasn't much, but his solicitous behavior had calmed the primal part of her that felt like murdering him with her bare hands.

"After all, I presented you with such an extraordinary offer. I admit to being surprised at your attempt to run away from it. After Hoggle's comments this afternoon," his mouth thinned, the only sign of his displeasure, "I thought I would offer you this chance to dispel your doubts."

Mostly.

He looked down at a formless gray mass between his hands, balancing it lazily on a cream-clad palm. Against his pale skin, the near-white gloves should have looked effete, or subservient--but, of course, they didn't. Instead they called to mind the pearl-gray suits and watch fobs of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Greater Egg.

Did that make her Daisy, trapped now in the life of unending, life-draining gaiety and merriment?

He must have sensed her mood. His fingers moved rapidly in his palm, teasing the substance into a small figure--a doll with cascades of loose hair and a ridiculous fluffy layered dress. As he bent down and breathed on it, the small figure looked up and smiled, a Cheshire cat replica of the one on his face. The doll turned, pirouetting in her pink dress, her gold curls spinning out in charming disarray. She finished her turn and curtseyed deeply to Sarah. But as Sarah began to smile, the doll did not stop her forward motion, slipping further and further into her skirts until she was a puddle of mauve and peach and yellow. The warm hues seemed to leach away without staining the pure ivory of his gloves, as if the color simply had decided that it could not exist on that space of flawless neutrality. Soon it was the same gray material as before.

Sarah watched, fascinated, as Jareth closed his hand into a fist, then opened it.

His palm was innocuously empty.

"Should I applaud?" she murmured.

His face darkened momentarily, and the bright sunshine streaming through the windows seemed to dim.

_Everything around you is a bit of a reflection of your own thoughts_, Hoggle had told her earlier.

She tried to remind herself that while Jareth was no reflection to disappear at the right angle, the terminal distance, he could not spin a world for her without allowing her to affect it in some way.

She took a deep breath and wished.

The sunlight seemed, well, sunnier. She wasn't sure if it was a true change or just because she had hoped it would be so. Or wasn't that the same thing, here?

"Bravo," Jareth said softly, and she looked up. He was regarding her with taut concentration, head cocked to one side. Loose blond hair spilled into his eyes, veiling whatever she might have learned to read there.

She itched to push it away. Jareth was always impossible to believe, a creature of such intense magic that she felt a constant driving urge to touch, to feel, to prove to some hidden sense that it was not one wide dream.

The dark, ugly thought that the past day was some fevered dream in an Eamerica shack, or worse, a Mekuzae drug-induced haze, scared her.

The gentle heat warming her skin in the unreal house did nothing to reassure her. Neither did the figure opposite her, still as stone as he watched her with an unblinking gaze.

"Tell me that this is all real," she said, breaking whatever silence he had nurtured.

Jareth shrugged, drawing one knee up to his chest and letting the other rest on the floor. She was drawn to his bare feet, mentally cataloguing them as normal, human-looking feet. A quick flick of her eyes confirmed that his hands were still gloved.

Jareth's lazy smile confirmed he had followed all her movements. "I could tell you, but would that truly make a difference?"

She stared.

"After all," he continued blithely, "If I was a dream, telling you that it was real wouldn't confirm it either way." He paused. "Have you tried pinching yourself?"

She met his eyes evenly before snorting. "Yes. Much as I'd like to deny it."

"And?"

"It hurt."

"Good."

"Good?"

The smile deepened, turning what might have been a friendly expression into a mouthful of sharp edges and lines. "Pain tempers our existence to one of beauty."

_Thousands of years_, she remembered. She shivered.

"You tell me," she tried instead, hoping he would give her some advice on how to prove this real. "How can I figure it out?"

Jareth tapped his index finger thoughtfully against his lips, and her sudden familiarity dissipated into irritation.

"I can think of one method," he said in measured tones, "but I suspect that you would not be entirely pleased by it."

She ignored the warning, much more interested in discovering the truth. "I don't care," she said petulantly. "If this is all some dream, I need to know now."

He smiled bitterly. "I see that you do not change in some ways." Dropping his other leg to the ground, he pushed against the marble slab and stood up. Quick as thought, he was beside her, bending over the chair, blotting out the sunlight.

In that space of angled shadows, he kissed her, taking advantage of her open-mouthed outrage to invite himself fully into the kiss.

The velvet of the chair cushioned her head. All she could feel was the maddening itch of stray golden hair and the gentle pressure of his mouth on hers as he coaxed her to respond.

Lost to all else, she did. She leaned into him, face tilted upwards to him as the blood pounded in her head and dizziness swept over her. She felt gloved hands against the back of her shirt even as she pulled upwards, coiling her arms around him and drawing him closer and down, until he was half-sprawled across her on the chair, his mouth still searing hers.

They drew apart, lungs heaving for air in the same patternless rhythm. Separated from him by inches, Sarah realized the implications of what had just happened and immediately panicked. A shy look confirmed he was watching her, blue eyes glittering like stars.

All she had to do, she realized, was reach for him again and he would show her exactly what he had meant the night before.

A flood of crimson washed over her face. She trembled as she untangled herself from him and curled up into a tight ball pressed against the high back of the chair, ducking her head so that he couldn't read her face--and to prevent herself from seeing the satisfaction she feared was on his face. Her hair fell heavy around her, effectively hiding her from that frightening concentration. Cheeks burning, she closed her eyes.

A gloved finger swept her jaw line, disappeared.

"Did it help?" Not quite emotionless, but exquisitely controlled. "Do you believe this is real now?"

_You foolish, foolish girl,_ she thought, still breathing heavily. He had all but asked for permission, and she had thoughtlessly let him. It had been another point proven--this was no dream, although she had no idea why kissing Jareth had served as such unswayable truth.

In more ways than one.

Hiding her face was useless. She could feel the fine tremors in her body, and he was not blind. Still screwing her eyes shut, she willed the frantic beating of her heart to slow.

She nodded in a quick, rushed movement.

Sarah felt the brush of air and the shift of padding as the Goblin King withdrew. She heard the soft whisper of bare feet against stone, then the quiet click of the door.

Only then did she allow the tears to drop, one by one, into the scarlet upholstery. Huddled into the safety of her own arms and legs, Sarah wept for once-forgotten lives, missed chances, and the Goblin King.

-----

Upstairs, in a darkened room, Jareth contemplated a crystal spinning in midair before him. Sarah shuddered in the tiny picture, still hunched over in her chair.

"Yer majesty," said a straight-backed goblin, hesitantly stepping through the doorway. He bobbed his head respectfully. "You summoned Catsqueak?"

The Goblin King closed his palm around the crystal before the other could come close enough to see the image. "I did," he said, looking out the window at the cloud-covered moon. It was a starless night.

It was always a starless night in the Underground.

"Inform the captain of the Guard to triple his patrols indefinitely." Jareth frowned, unseen by Catsqueak. "Tell him to request assistance from the hags. All squads must have a sniffer…and a mender. Any breaches must be repaired immediately and their location reported to me."

The goblin nodded. "Is that all, yer majesty?"

"I want the hounds free tonight."

The goblin stopped for a moment, mouth opening and closing in astonishment. "Right away, yer highness." He left with a hurried step.

When the dragging footfalls faded, the Goblin King opened his palm. The glowing sphere within drifted back to its former position before him. Sarah was still drawn up in the chair, her head hidden.

He lifted a hand to touch the crystal, then thought better of it.

"Sarah," he said quietly. "I will not let you be taken again."

Inside the crystal, Sarah looked up, her tearstained expression gazing into nothing. Emerald eyes shone in her swollen face.

Angrily, he waved his hand. The crystal vanished into the ether.

Jareth turned away.

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**Author's Notes:** And to match last week's update of Sever, here is chapter two (of four) for End of Sleep. I've just noticed I published the last chapter in December--that means I'm just beating the six-month mark. Since I have until September to play around, I can promise you that the next update will be out by August. Honest. Thanks for all the lovely reviews I received on the first chapter: comments are always appreciated! I live for concrit and am happy to receive it on any bit of the story.

Before I forget, a great big thank you to neversaynever for her quick run-through before this posting. I owe her much chocolate and other good things.


	3. Time and Truth

**The End of Sleep**

by Alison Harvey

Disclaimer: Characters from the movie Labyrinth belong to Henson & Co. All else is mine.

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_Cleopatra:_

Courteous lord, one word.  
Sir, you and I must part, but that's not it:  
Sir, you and I have lov'd, but there's not it;  
That you know well: something it is I would,  
O! my oblivion is a very Antony,  
And I am all forgotten.

--_Antony and Cleopatra_ (I.iii.106-111)

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Chapter 3: Time and Truth 

It was wasteland. The earth stretched flat to the horizon, sere and brown. Where it was not dry as dust, it glimmered in strange shades, auras that seeped into the air in twisted skeins of color. First, plague had devastated the good citizens, killing them where they stood. Then, later, when the antidotes had been used to vault the corporations to power, the sickness wars, the drug wars, the haze of nuclear and chemical destruction had all claimed their toll.

President Chie ruled Eamerica from what remained of Boston, a stone city rising from the incinerated girders of the steel-and-glass city it had once been.

Technology still existed, but Chie's power came from the magic she had harnessed, holding each stone surer than the super-polymers her research teams had developed. It was the ethereal that built the crooked towers, soaring skyward like twisted fingers, magic that brought seawater flooding through new-cut canals in swirling, blackened eddies, and strength of will that bent the ley lines, like the buried boulevards of Paris, to the center of the reborn city.

All magic needs a focus. The ley lines traced a path to the highest tower of the city, reaching to the clouded sky with jagged stones. Inside, a dark staircase curled around itself as it climbed.

The room at the top of the tower was circular, the better to let magic flow without colliding upon itself. It was bare stone, with no decoration, so nothing could soak up the magic. The protection was two-fold. Magic would not be wasted, but neither would it be absorbed, to be released later, accidentally and unwanted. The Falconer had learned this lesson. His teacher never had, which was how the Falconer had ascended to the right hand of Chie. It was a position he jealousy guarded, and one he had no intention of giving away.

He stood in the center of the room, in a carefully drawn chalk circle of protection. A young boy shivered inside the circle with him, but the Falconer ignored him. His hand tightly clutched the back of the boy's neck; the boy's hands were bound behind him with iron cuffs. His hands moved, twisting inside the iron so that no stretch of blistered skin touched the bands for long.

The boy turned his head constantly, smelling the currents of the strange magic his master was calling. He tilted his head as if to see the crackling energies spinning around him, but it was a futile move. His milky eyes spun without seeing. He had neither iris nor pupil in that opaque gaze.

The Falconer had long ago learned that eyes that saw were liabilities in his tools.

He was also blind to the currents, but that was because his sight was turned inwards, seeking the boundaries between worlds. His breath was shallow and infrequent, his body as still as the boy's was active. His other hand clutched his prize, a single hair. It was black, but that might have been the grime that covered it. He had searched the chapel in which the two rebels had vanished for days until he had found it.

Without a portal spell--and damned if the notes and summoning objects the rebels had used hadn't vanished along with them--he was forced to take the long route. Without a connection to an object of the otherworld, though, he could never have found the long, cold pathway of the void between worlds, where minds without protection vanished.

In the darkness he traveled behind his closed eyes, a black shadow drew near, mouth opening to reveal jagged slivers of a deeper darkness. It sniffed soundlessly, and then lifted its head to bay to the everlasting night. The boy shivered more violently, shrinking away. The Falconer started a quick patter of incantations, retreating behind the boy. The hound drew closer, mouth gaping. The magician chanted faster, careful to keep the boy between himself and the closing monster. With the last spell, a shield rose, with the Falconer safely inside as he prepared to leave. The hound lunged.

Beside him the boy sagged, limp. His foot dragged against the chalk, breaking the circle. The iron cuffs brushed against his captor's finger as he fell.

With a gasp, the Falconer's eyes flew open. He released the body, lip curling with disgust as it slumped to the ground.

He would need more next time. He had been so close, and every predator he evaded became one less to sate the next time. There were defenses in place: old weaknesses re-stitched and, judging by the sudden surge of dog-monsters, new guards, but he could work a way around them. If he could, he could follow the path easily. He rubbed his free hand against the other to break the ice that rimed them, wincing as he touched the raw patch left on his index finger by the touch of iron.

Chie would never see his escape coming. If she had, she would have stopped him from free use of the native talents he found while serving her. This mortal world would not hold him for long. Somewhere, somehow, he would find the hole in the Goblin King's defenses.

And then he would be home.

-----

Sarah woke in darkness, curled up on top of the raw silk of the comforter. Her inner clock had reasserted itself while she had slept; she knew, without stirring, that it was time to start her day.

The temptation to burrow deeper under the covers and lose herself in oblivion was hard to resist, but at the same time, impossible. Her body knew it was time to wake, and acted accordingly.

"I need light," she said, softly, to the room. The curtains opened hesitantly, letting her eyes adjust, until she could see red-orange land sloping away from her window.

Two goblins had brought her a small pile of clothing before she had gone to bed the night before, apologizing that they couldn't find any more. From what they said, she suspected they had been hastily cut down from the Goblin King's clothing, but she refused to entertain that thought. What mattered was that they were clothes, and clean.

She dressed quickly, working her way into her own undergarments, mended with near-invisible stitches; loose slacks; and a long-sleeved shirt of a creamy fabric, rough-woven but soft and light against her skin. The slippers from yesterday were still her only footwear, but they had a thick sole, and the current incarnation of the Castle Beyond the Goblin City was immaculately clean.

Her rumbling stomach led her to leave her room, despite how safe and comforting it looked compared to a castle where the Goblin King lurked. She frowned, trying to remember how Hoggle had led her to the kitchen. The hallway's doors loomed invitingly, but she ignored them as she made her way to the staircase. She descended the stairs slowly, looking at the central trunk for any sign of the hidden door Hoggle had opened last night.

Sarah had nearly given up when she saw a tiny scrap of white snagged against a piece of bark. She leaned over and recognized the lace paneling of the nightgown she had worn yesterday. It had torn on the rough surface, marking it in defiance of the otherwise uniform surface. When she pressed her hand flat against the bark the lace had caught on, it cracked open. She pushed through into dim light and walked to the following wall, where the single portrait guarded the passageway to the kitchen.

When she touched the seed of the pomegranate, only a single vine came through, poking her gently on the shoulder. She brushed it away, smiling as it curled slightly around her fingertip before withdrawing. Then the painting disappeared, revealing a plain archway that led directly into the kitchen. Evidently the plant didn't feel like playing.

The goblin server shuffled in a moment later, bowing and ducking his head repeatedly. She managed to make out that breakfast would be ready in a moment, and did she have any preferences?

"Eggs," she said. "And do you have any toast?" She thought some more, Sarah William's memories temporarily replacing her own. "And coffee, if you have some."

The egg yolks were marbled with blue, and the toast looked like it had never heard of flour, made out of some not-quite-substitute instead, but the coffee was excellent and smelled authentic, and there was a bowl of fresh honey to spread on the not-toast.

The coffee finished, she put down the cup. At the precise moment that the ceramic clinked against the table, the Goblin King strode in.

Sarah doubted his appearance was a coincidence.

She stood up. "Here, I'll let you sit down. I'm just finishing here and I should be getting back to my room. I didn't mean to intrude, I was just hungry. Sorry, I'll be leaving you now. . . "

She was babbling. But every word she threw between them was another wall against last night, against the remembrance of how she'd invited him to prove this wasn't some dream, and the still-electric, mortifying moment when he'd proven it with the touch of his lips. No, this place was many things, but dream was not one of them.

The Goblin King did the one thing she didn't expect.

He smiled, a curiously gentle expression that for once didn't appear to conceal a second meaning. "Good morning, Sarah. Don't trouble yourself to leave: I know you have questions for me about yourself and Tommy."

She didn't, not at all, but this sudden change in attitude was startling. Her hand was still on the back of the chair. Grasping it, she sank slowly back into it, watching him warily.

"I want to know how long we can stay here." She wanted to know much more, starting and ending with the ring, and his claims, but she couldn't interrupt this moment of truce. This would be enough for the moment.

He smiled at her from his seat across the table, sipping from a cup the goblin had brought him. "You should know by now that both of you are welcome to stay here as long as you wish." He was dressed in black, a shade so rich that it seemed to drain the colors from the surfaces surrounding him. The leeching of color was disturbing, and hard to watch. She could almost feel the same magic tugging her in, tempting her to drown herself in that void. His hair shone like candle flame above the span of darkness.

"We can both work for our keep. We wouldn't want to live just on your generosity."

He steepled his fingers, bringing index fingers together in an elegant fold. "Tommy has magical ability, which is rare in both worlds. I would like to train him so that he may assist me."

"You've already started doing that," she said shortly. "I don't think I could stop him if I tried."

"Then we're agreed that I will make sure his magic is brought under control. The same offer extends to you, of course."

Sarah looked up, eyes wide. "What?"

He smiled. She saw the tips of pointed teeth. "Your world is regaining magic. You have a minor talent. Fire, I would guess. Nothing more than flame conjuring. I could teach you, if you wish."

"I've had enough of magic," she said. "The Mekuza and Chie have their pet magicians, and I don't want to know anything about that."

He shrugged. "Your choice."

"Then if you want Tommy's magic, what can I contribute?"

His eyes flicked away, then back. The sudden loss and recovery of his attention was shocking. "I suppose we must consider the possibilities. You should spend a few days testing the different domains of the Labyrinth, to see if anything calls to you."

She was surprised he hadn't taken advantage of the moment to suggest a different role. It seemed unlike him.

He smiled at her from behind the edge of the glass, as beautiful today as he had been terrifying the day before. She could still remember the feel of his hair between her hands, the warmth of his skin against hers.

She jerked her head sharply. Thoughts like that were dangerous. She was more than her memories. She was herself.

If Jareth saw her discomfort, he gave no indication. He had paused, looking at the glass he held. Beneath his gloved hands, it began to tremble, fluttering as if made of thousands of sewn cloth patches. Slowly, beneath his hands, it collapsed into a rain of tiny translucent butterflies with faceted, crystalline wings. They were soundless in the air, but she could feel the smallest of breezes drifting towards her.

The cloud moved slowly until it hovered above her head. She raised her left hand to brush against the wings of one. It settled on her little finger, walking over the back of her hand and her remaining fingers with tiny pinprick legs until it rested on her thumb, fluttering delicately. She brought it near her face to better see the delicate patterns of its wings, shot through with tiny tongues of flame.

It brushed itself against the line of her jaw with only the barest of touches; she had brought it too close. Lowering her hand, she blew gently on its wings, sending it away it to rejoin the cloud hovering around her with frantic wingbeats.

"Why are they still here?"

He regarded her calmly, his eyes glittering. "They wait to know what you want with them."

She looked at the empty table. "I would think you'd want your glass back."

At her words, the butterflies stirred into action. One by one, they descended, lowering to the table. The first landed in a circle, the next filling it in. The remaining creatures landed in a growing spiral, slowly settling into the shape of the glass. With each soundless landing, crystal wings beat more slowly, lethargically. In the space of a few seconds, they had stilled. The glass stood before her, ordinary, with none of the beauty each individual butterfly had shown. She lifted one hand to touch the cool glass, pulling it away in regret.

Jareth looked at the glass, then at her. "See? Your word sufficed."

She stood up, uncomfortable with something hovering just behind his pleasant expression.

"You said I could look around?"

He nodded and stood as well, beckoning to her with black gloves that looked like the same material as the clothes she wore. There were no coincidences in this land.

"I can begin the. . . tour immediately, if you would like."

She backed away, towards the door. "That's nice of you, but I was hoping to go with Hoggle instead."

He matched her stride, keeping close to her, that pleasant smile still fixed on his face as if he couldn't sense her fear. She knew he could, and bit the inside of her lip to jolt her back. She needed control.

"Now, why would I do that? Hoggle couldn't possibly take you through all the places you'll need to see."

He took another step forward; she stepped back to feel with one hand for the archway and came instead in contact with blank stone.

"Leaving so soon? We just started speaking."

"Then I can go by myself, thank you."

He caught her left hand, held it. The touch of his glove was as light as wingbeats against her skin.

She looked at the bridge between them, and remembered his strange exhilaration when she had held the butterfly. Words from her research as Sarah Williams drifted into her mind, unbidden.

_Even in his land, there are rules that may keep you safe. Without invitation, the Goblin King cannot touch any trespasser. _

It was too late to help Sarah Williams, but it could help her now. She yanked her hand out of his. "You can't touch me. I didn't give you permission!" She stepped backwards. "I didn't know!"

"Sarah, Sarah," he said, shaking his head, already reaching for her again. "You did know. Surely some part of you remembers."

She shook her head, frantic. "No. I mean, I know now, but not because of you or anything I remember. It's not there! I didn't know!"

He let his hand drop to his side. His face hardened. "Very well."

She backed up again, but this time felt the breeze from the open door instead of wall. She vanished into the doorway, his cold expression lingering with her long after she had run far, far, away from the Goblin King.

It was only when she paused, out of breath, that she saw where her flight had led her. She was back in the long hallway that her bedroom opened out to, the hallway that stretched as far as she could see, a thousand doors disappearing into the distance, each one unique.

She couldn't see the doorway Hoggle had pointed out as her own: carved from pleasant-scented brown wood and ornamented with a brass handle. In fact, none of the doors seemed familiar. Instead of deep red gems or sandstone, the ones in sight all glimmered with a metallic, oily sheen, with square doorknobs of slate-grey. Did they move of their own will? Or was she confused because she had run too far down the hallway before realizing where she was? She couldn't see which end held the staircase, but knew her door had been near it both yesterday and today.

She started retracing her steps in the direction she had came, then stopped.

"I don't want to go back to my room," she said to herself. After all, nothing waited for her there. Staying in her room was unexciting at best, and at worst, begging a casual visit from the Goblin King. If she kept walking, he would at least have to go to the trouble of finding her.

She turned to the nearest metallic door, which was a coppery color, its slick patina shining with warm-hued rainbows. There was a small geometric zigzag etched on the otherwise dull knob.

"I don't want to be killed," she said to the air, wishing it even harder. There was no response.

She pulled it open. A wind rose, sending a spray of sand into her face. She wiped at her face, squinting through the dust storm. In front of the door was the top of a hill of red-gold sand, with only a single tree in sight. It was skeletal and brittle, with no leaves to mark it as living. A clock hung forlornly in the air beside it, ticking away thirteen hours with a derelict, abandoned air. It was worn and pitted, with only a few strips of gilt to show it had once been gold. The faceplate was deeply scratched.

Beyond the hill, though, was a tangle of red walls that led to a craggy mountain. Perched at the top of the mountain was a castle that Sarah knew. It had haunted her dreams the past nights.

She made it halfway through the door before she stopped. She didn't know if the door would still be there if she let it close, and she didn't think the sand would hold it open. She took off one of the slippers instead, and wedged it between the door and its frame. Then she took off the other and held it carefully as she walked to the tree and its clock.

The sand was warm, and soft, not coarse like she had expected.

There was a square cushion under the tree, the same red hue as the sand it lay on. Unlike the aging clock, it looked new. As she sat down on it, facing the old vision of the Labyrinth, she felt a faint tingle. Whoever had placed it there had used magic to keep it safe from the elements.

The wind howled in the tree branches, but the sand it kicked up passed by her without touching her. More magic. She drew her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them, looking at the Goblin Castle.

Jareth had said what she was looking at now no longer existed. So if he was telling the truth, what she was looking at was more like an artwork than a real place. She wondered if he came here often. The cushion and its protective spell suggested that he planned to return. Why would he save the memory of this place? She remembered their time here. Curled up on the hill overlooking the Labyrinth, she felt much more Sarah Williams than she had any other time except in dreams. At the base of the hill, the wind kicked up dust devils. They whirled in elaborate dances near the fountain and the gates.

She looked until she thought she saw the hedges, and wished she could see a hulking orange figure. Maybe that clearing was the bog, but Sir Didymus's challenges couldn't be heard from here. The gates were closed and the ivy walls were immaculate, but Hoggle wasn't in sight.

Which was ridiculous. Hoggle was inside the new Labyrinth, not this memory, and Didymus and Ludo were gone. Hoggle had told her. But looking out over the twists and turns below her, she wanted desperately to be back in that simpler time. When there was a villain, and she was a storybook princess. . .

. . . Not someone the Goblin King had known for lives, that he wanted back.

She pushed in her mind on the locked doors she felt there, but they resisted. Whoever she had been, she was only herself now, with one other set of memories to draw on.

_See?_ Jareth had told her. _Your word sufficed_.

Whatever he had been trying to tell her, she felt lost.

She stared at the Goblin Castle and the city at its feet, wondering in which of its rooms she had danced with its king.

He had lied to her. She knew that. But he had also told her truths, important ones. If he had twisted the stories in some places it was more to do with a view colored by his perceptions than malice.

He had offered her everything, twice. She wondered if there would be a third and last time, the chance storybook princesses always had. She wondered if she would be changed if she could remember all her past selves. She wondered if she would choose to stay with him. He scared her, fascinated her, and drew her pity. She didn't know him. . . but she didn't even know herself.

Right now, she only wanted to be safe. She didn't want all this confusion.

She stood up, brushing at the sand clinging to her ankles, and retrieved her shoe, stepping back into the hallway. Hopping on one leg, she put the other slipper back on, again watching with curiosity as it shrank to fit her foot.

She looked at the other metallic doors, each one shining with a different set of fractured rainbows. Realization hit her.

She threw open the pewter door to see a ballroom, fresh-lit candles waiting in tall candelabras amidst swaths of glittering fabric.

Shining aluminum led to a dank tunnel with scattered cobwebs, and a forgotten tricorn hat.

Dull zinc unmasked staircases crammed end over end, where she could almost hear her frantic footsteps as she ran.

Beaten gold revealed a suspended platform of shattered walls and hopes, dusted with feathers and fragments of broken crystal. Words echoed in the air.

_Stop! Wait! Look, Sarah! Look at what I'm offering you. . . _

She slammed it shut, face white. He had kept all of them. Every place where they had met was here, pristine. Maybe, just maybe, he was telling more of the truth than she had thought. The metallic doors showed her smeared, distorted reflections of herself.

Her heartbeat slowed. She remembered something important.

"Where's Tommy?" she said, and thought she felt the air thicken. "I'm. . . going to walk down this hall," she said, not sure how to do this. "I want to find the door that will take me to him."

She began to walk, footsteps swallowed by the endless line of doors. As the metallic doors disappeared, she calmed.

A chime rang in the air, more insistently until she slowed. She laughed. "That's my cue?" She looked at the door it had indicated.

Light glowed softly from the crack between double doors marked from hinge to latch with elaborate scrollwork of gilt leaves, reflecting from the grooves of stem and fringe with a slight gleam. In the twilight of the winding corridor, the warmth drew Sarah against her will. She paused, about to touch the left-hand door, remembering yesterday's wreath of vines. Her touch might set off some response that wasn't gentle, and neither Hoggle, Jareth, or even Tommy was around to help her.

Instead she stepped as close as she could without touching the surface, and looked into the gap, trying to see what lay through them. She could feel heat waft up from the wood, and realized, this close, that it was vibrating softly, like a hummingbird's heartbeat.

"Beautiful," she said, and could have sworn the door quivered slightly in reply. She was sure when it opened the tiny bit more she needed to see into the room beyond.

"Thank you," she said after a moment. She brought up her hand and pressed it flat against a fan-shaped leaf the size of her hand, and stood there, letting the murmur of its pulse seep into her skin. Then she bent forward again until her hair brushed against the doors.

Inside, she could see Jareth, a black-clad figure in relief, leaning far too close to Tommy. And Tommy was holding the source of that bright glow in the palm of his hand. A ball of light the size of a fist laid in what she thought was his palm; she could barely see her friend and ward except as a slight decrease in the light. He was glowing as well, but not as strongly.

She slid her head further across the wood until her ear was close to the crack, straining to hear the soft murmur of the Goblin King's voice.

". . . not enough control," he said. "You're letting it spill out over you, showing it to the whole world. Think about the light in your hand; now push down it, yes, close it up, don't let any of it escape. . . "

Tommy's voice, strained. "It hurts. It doesn't want to do that." He was raspy, forcing out the words against whatever task was consuming him.

The Goblin King, more patient than she could have imagined. "It will always want to do that. But in order to use it, you have to focus it. Close your eyes and concentrate. Picture something heavy doing it for you. . . water, pushing on all sides, or a stone wall being built around it."

The glow started to dim.

"Yes, that's it. Now, focus. Don't speak. Just press it in."

The light barely spilled out of the doors now, just enough to catch Sarah's chestnut hair and turn it auburn in the fading light.

"Now picture it hardening beneath your fingers. Be careful now, this is the tricky part. It took me a long time to get the knack of this, but you're older and should be better at making sure it's completely even."

She could barely hear Tommy's whispered question. "What happens if I don't?"

Jareth's response was dry. "It explodes. Frequently in whatever form it feels like. Remind me to tell you about the time it caused flocks of very tiny chickens to invade the castle. But now. . . " He trailed off into expectant silence.

Sarah could feel the tension of the moment, even if Jareth's bantering tone hadn't tipped her that whatever was happening was far more important than he wanted Tommy to believe.

There was a shiver in the air.

Then Tommy's voice, querulous. "Is this. . . ? Is it good enough? Did I do it right?"

Silence, then a reply suffused with warm contentment.

"It's perfect."

Sarah exhaled, a smile creeping over her face.

"Now you have it. Push outwards, to see if you've left any stray pieces."

She felt that shiver again, but knew this time it had somehow found her.

"You should come in," Tommy called to the door, and she knew she was caught.

Taking a deep breath, she pushed through the doors, stepping through with a brief stab of guilt. She was more than the girl she'd been when she'd crossed into the Underground, and both Sarahs knew that she shouldn't have been eavesdropping. Like everything in this strange new world, she was helpless before her impulses, tugged in new directions by each upwelling desire.

She stopped in the doorway, startled. This was no room; this was a garden grown wild around a still pool, with blue sky overhead and a diffuse sun beaming down. Tangles of flowers in every shade of green, from the white-pale of unfurling leaves to the deep black of night blooms, grew from just inside the radius of the doors to the pool by which Jareth and Tommy stood, waiting expectantly. The flowers were waist-high where she stood, gaping, but there was the slimmest of paths, carpeted in lush midsummer grass, winding its way to the pool, which reflected the sky perfectly. Tall trees with turquoise trunks and limbs garlanded with tiny yellow-green flowers like small stars started at the far end of the pond and wrapped around the far sides of what she thought might be the edges of the room, blocking her view.

Even Tommy, dressed in green slacks and a sleeveless shirt, seemed to be a natural extension of this place, his loose hair swaying in the same breeze that played with leaf edges. Only Jareth seemed wholly alien in his close-fitting, high-collared shirt, black pants tucked into shining boots. The wind passed over him without touching him. He stood apart, gloved hands clasped in front of him, with predatory silence.

If he had known she had been listening at the door, his face didn't show it.

She started to walk forwards, but the edge of the door beneath her hand vibrated uneasily.

"What?"

"No shoes," Tommy called. His hands were by his side, empty now. Beside him, Jareth was silent, his face unreadable.

She stepped out of the slippers, which sunk into the ground like quicksand. She hoped they'd reappear later.

The grass was soft and springy beneath her feet, cool like thick moss. Each step she took released dizzying smells into the air that made her light-headed and almost euphoric. She pushed through the wilderness, making her way to the pond where the small boy and his dark-clad watcher waited.

The flowers grew taller as she approached the pool, rising quickly to her shoulders before she pushed her way through the last blossoms with a shower of pale green pollen and the smell of ginger.

For the second time, she stopped. The pond wasn't reflecting the sky; it was the same opaque blue, pearlescent and fathomless. She dropped to her knees before she could reach Jareth and Tommy, reaching to dip her hand into the liquid blue. It slipped through her fingers like air, dropping soundlessly back into the pond without a ripple. Her hand sparkled where it had held the water, like the dust of a butterfly's wings. Beneath the distortion, her skin seemed older, more wrinkled.

Tommy smiled as she got up, looking down at her hand. She turned it over, palm down, and the dust trickled into nothingness with the same smell of ginger. The age spots disappeared into her skin, veins sinking down as her skin filled out again.

"D'you like it?" he asked, running up to her.

"What is it?" she asked, staring down at the still water.

"Time," he said. "I was going to stop you, but you figured it out." He grinned. "I asked

Jareth if I could go swimming in it, but he told me that would be a bad idea."

She shivered, thinking of what could have happened if she'd found the room by mistake.

Tommy grinned. "Got something to show you."

His energy was contagious, enough so that she almost forgot the lurking figure of the Goblin King, who had yet to acknowledge her presence.

"Show me then," she said, smiling back at him and pointedly ignoring the other person present.

He held out his hand and squinted. There was a brief, dazzling flare of light that rapidly condensed into a solid, glassy sphere. It rested innocently on his palm.

A crystal.

She stretched out a hand, paused. "Can I?"

Tommy looked over his shoulder, and then nodded. She let her fingers touch its slightly warm surface, gently pressing to test its strength. It gave slightly, but didn't break. Although it looked at first like the ones she had seen the Goblin King, there was some trick of the light, the way it reflected off the crystal, that made her sure it wasn't quite the same. She didn't know if it was inexperience or the quirk of a different magic.

Her fingers closed around the sphere as she prepared to pick it up.

"Don't." A black glove curled around her wrist, her only warning that the Goblin King was now behind her. Once she knew, she could feel his presence looming behind her, a shadow in this place of airy day. She let go, and looked at Tommy in apology.

A sudden strain crossed Tommy's face. He pressed his lips together tightly, closing his eyes as the sphere flickered in and out before becoming solid again.

"Until he has learned to control his magic better, he can only maintain that focus while it remains in contact with his hand."

She didn't face him, looking straight ahead at the placid pool. "I'm sorry. If I'd known, I wouldn't have done it."

"Now you know."

"She didn't mean to," Tommy said. "I shoulda told her."

"Tommy, I can feel your control slipping." The boy's eyes flew shut. "Turn around, Sarah," Jareth said. "You'll distract him. This learning is crucial."

She was not yet immune to the power that sang through her when he used that deep, crisp tone. Unwillingly, Sarah faced him.

"As for you," he said, frowning down at her. "It disturbs me that I can't feel your movements around the Labyrinth like I can Tommy's. I need to be able to find you if necessary."

So he had been watching her as she touched the lake. She was outraged by his assumptions, even though she herself had worried about the same when she went exploring earlier that day.

"I don't need your guard," she said.

"Foolish girl. There are places here where you could die and we would never know." His voice was sharp. She was sure it was deliberate. His eyes narrowed. "Don't argue with me about this."

He held out his hand. Resting in it was a necklace with a tiny teardrop of amber. She picked it up by the tiny silver clasp, suspending it before her. It glowed with quiet warmth that made her think of the doors.

"I'll wear it," she said, "if it would make you more comfortable."

A stiff nod was her reply.

She eyed the clasp, remembering her worn-down nails. Realized that she could never put it on herself. Thought for a moment about the consequences of what she was considering. He'd told her it would keep her safe, and she felt afraid and confident by turns in this changeable, fickle place. This, she had to believe, was not a ploy to gain more privileges.

She took a deep breath. "Would you help me put it on?" She turned again to face Tommy, using one hand to push up the heavy fall of her hair while the other cupped the necklace behind her. Standing there, the breeze dancing across her bare neck, she felt acutely exposed. She didn't trust him, not yet, but she would allow him to do this.

He picked it up with only the faintest whisper of leather against her palm. The chain fell around her neck with a quick chill, the warm pulse of the amber settling into the hollow of her collarbone. There was the slightest pressure against her nape as the clasp came to rest.

"Thank you," she said quietly, grateful that he hadn't used the opportunity to touch her. There were some advantages to magic. And he'd played fair, for once. She could feel another barrier give way to this proof.

There was a sudden tenseness in the air. "I am pleased you're wearing it."

She turned around again, caught in that icy regard. "I'll leave you to finish with Tommy. I didn't mean to interrupt."

He shook his head, and she could breathe again. "No. I meant to find you." Unexpectedly, his lips quirked into a smile. "You were never properly introduced to the heart of the Labyrinth. Would you like to see its current incarnation?"

The years stretched out as a veil between them, and she remembered that heavy pool of time just behind them. "What did it look like before?"

The smile vanished; his lips thinned. "It was a room of staircases."

The Escher Room. A flood of memories swept past her, nearly drowning her in the deluge. She remembered Jareth, taunting her. She remembered running after Toby, sure she'd lose him before the final seconds rung out. She remembered the wreck of the room, and the offer Jareth had made to her. With a struggle, she locked away Sarah William's memories. Sarah was regretting ever taking that damned crystal from him the first night. When he gave her his full attention like this, something dark and deep swirled up, a growing ache that raced through her like drugged wine, slowing her reactions to him at the time she wanted them the sharpest.

"I'll take your word for it," she said dryly, her voice at odds with her inner turmoil. Sarah Williams was locked firmly away for now. There was decades of longing in the woman's memories, and she certainly didn't want to share them.

It occurred to her that Tommy looked remarkably like Toby, who had told her a selective remembrance of his time with the Goblin King, the memories frozen in his mind by the exposure to magic. Jareth had meant to keep Toby as an apprentice, once Sarah lost. Now he had Tommy instead.

"I didn't ruin it?" she asked, some part of her relieved to learn it had survived. It had had a stark beauty of its own, mirrors turned on mirrors.

"You could never destroy the heart of the Labyrinth. Only your perceptions of it changed."

They were drawing near to dangerous territory, and she could feel them both circling it. She backed away as quickly as she could.

"I'd like to see it again," she said, drawn to the idea of being in the room again. "When can I go?"

He looked at her, seemed to come to a decision.

"Now."

The tip of a black-clad finger touched her arm, and the world dissolved.

-----

Sarah blinked, dazzled. In the eyeblink of travel there had been absolute darkness; now she stood in a vast white room of smooth stone. It was cold beneath her toes, and she regretted giving her slippers to the time-pool garden.

She turned, slowly, aware that Jareth stood a polite distance away while she looked. The room was perfectly round, and the white stone was seamless, lighting the room with its soft glow. No shadows existed in that perfect spill of illumination. As she watched, the light dimmed, and then brightened. A few seconds again, it did the same.

"A heartbeat," she said, crossing to the wall. She put her hand on it gently and felt a surge of heat as the next pulse came.

"Not quite," said her guide. "But the idea is similar."

She looked up. The ceiling was much farther away than she had thought and trying to find it made her dizzy. Her eyes kept sliding on the shining stone. The flash of heat beneath her hand brought her thoughts abruptly back, and she turned to look at the Goblin King.

"Why is it so empty this time?"

He raised his eyebrows. "Empty?"

She gestured, circling her hand. "Last time it looked like a deranged circus funhouse. Now it's this science-looking place, empty. Why?"

He stepped back two measured paces, indicating a spot on the floor with a graceful sweep of his arm. "Only empty if you do not look. Touch."

Suspicious, she crouched down where he had pointed, placing her hand flat against the stone. This time, there was no surge of warmth. Instead, the temperature dropped so quickly that her hand ached and then burned with cold. She snatched it back, cradling it, looking up at him in anger. "What. . . ?"

"You're not looking," he said, his own eyes trained downwards where she had touched.

She glanced back down. There was a perfect negative of her hand against the pristine stone, a solid blackness that did not glow like the rest of the room. As she watched, the handprint began to separate into inky trails that writhed against the stone, spreading outwards in thick swirls. She frowned, watching as the black whorls moved faster, spinning underneath her feet as they snaked to the walls. There was a pause. The light flickered. The black lines froze.

Sarah stood up, spinning around as she tried to look at the whole design. There was a pattern there, she could feel it, but it looked like a tangled mess from where she stood, full of random loops and double-backs and strange angular designs side-by-side organic curlicues and waves.

By her foot was the end of a single line. She looked again at the design, realized that there it was the only endpoint she could see.

She crouched down again, touched it with her finger. Nothing happened. Standing, she looked to Jareth, who was bent down on one knee examining a part of the design, murmuring something beneath his breath. He looked up questioningly.

"What is this?" she asked.

"The Labyrinth," he replied. His mismatched eyes watched her closely.

She stilled. "I don't see the pathways."

"That's because the lines show only the path, not the walls that contain it."

She looked at the whole design, spilling to the walls of the enormous, glowing room. "But. . . " She looked down again, at that tiny line that ended in the center of the room. "There's only one way to the center."

"To this room," he said. "Yes."

The walls seemed to fade, and ghostly echoes of staircases rose in her mind, haunted by a melody she'd never quite heard. She shook her head, clearing the images.

"But where are the other ways to the center?"

He pushed up from his knee and stood, one gloved hand clasping the other, eyes shining with amusement. "Why would there be other ways?"

"There's. . . "

"Sarah," he chided. "Remember. You once knew, even if you claim you don't remember."

She didn't remember. Instead, she stared down at the pathway, a horrible thought surfacing in her mind.

"But if there's only one path. . . I could have gone any way, all along. . . and. . . "

". . . And ended up in the center of the Labyrinth." He walked to her, boots whispering against the stone. He gestured to the stopping point of the line. "You would find, if you chose to walk this Labyrinth again, that you would always end up at the center. There are never false turns. Only one path from the beginning to the end."

The tangles and curlicues and loops of the twisting line mocked her. "But it looked like the path divided. . . "

He smiled. It was not a comforting smile. "Looks can be deceiving. There were no false turns, only the illusion of such."

"But how could you stop everyone from winning!" she blurted out.

The smile faded. "It is about the journey, not the route one takes. Instead of false turns, there are obstacles to overcome. Those unfortunates that do not complete it do not lose their way. They instead fail to confront whatever the Labyrinth chooses as the battleground. You must be strong enough to face both fears and failures and survive. "

"Like I did," she said.

"Only you could have passed them," he said. "It was a final test."

Her eyes widened in shock. "What?"

He stepped closer, fidgeting with the cuff of his black glove. The light drained where they stood, but neither cast a shadow. The lines of the Labyrinth map curled closer to them, drawn to the Goblin King. "I chose the Labyrinth a long time ago. I sent the legends to the mortal world, seeding each generation with the stories to guarantee each would send me those most drawn to the tale. Many came. Few made it far."

He stopped pulling at the glove. "Only you could have completed the Labyrinth I constructed; passed the tests I set. None made it to the center for centuries." His eyes narrowed as he looked at her, and she was caught in the darkness of his unequal pupils. "Until you came, brash and young and centuries late."

He paused, and she remembered the rush of wind against her as she fell through the broken stone of the staircases, plummeting towards the endgame.

"And won."

She remembered the caress of feathers against her cheek, and the aching sense of regret that mirrored what she had seen in his eyes that day.

The same regret she saw in him now.

"You twisted the rules," he continued, and she saw wry admiration cross his face. "And rejected my offer. I underestimated the strength of devotion you would have to the child, and the lack of recognition you showed. It had been a thousand years for me, after all. I assumed that your amnesia would end with my punishment." He frowned. "Imagine my shock when it did not."

He looked away, breaking the connection.

Regret crashed through her, quickly distilled into anger. It wasn't her fault if the damned Goblin King had missed his chance. He had never told her the truth that time. She sensed other things hidden in his stories, other half-truths left undiscovered.

"Why am I here now, then?" she questioned, hand sweeping out to point at the elaborate patterns of the Labyrinth. "Why were you waiting for me? Why did you design all this for me? You don't seem to be telling me about your past lives."

He ignored the first questions, answering only the last. "I have no lives to tell you about." He gave the tiniest shrug of resignation. "I was given long life instead."

Sarah stepped up at him, hair falling back behind her as she tilted her head up to stare at him, her gaze demanding even more than her words. "And what gave you that right? What gave you that authority, Goblin King?"

He met her look coolly, the same lack of yielding reflected back at her. Golden hair shaded his eyebrows, masking their eloquence. "Did I ever say that it was a gift?" He didn't step forward, but she felt, somehow, his presence widen, and she realized he was pushing outwards with his magic.

She opened her mouth, then closed it sharply enough that her teeth clicked together. Tightening her lips, she shook her head once, quickly.

"I never claimed," he said, "that my measure was any greater than yours."

"Goblin _King_," she threw back at him, "ruling your petty kingdom with your magic and your damned crystals."

"The same magic and same crystals that saved you and your brother from being slaves, or worse," he said, the sudden flash of emotion once again masked behind that smooth, inhuman face. "And you come from a world full of unequals, do you not? Why does it surprise you to find me in a position of authority here? Should we not be subject to the same division of talents?"

They both knew her unspoken answer: Sarah wanted him to be ordinary because she felt herself so. And because it wasn't, after all these years, _fair_.

"I gave you your chance," he said softly, menace at last sliding free of the velvet that had sheathed it today.

The feeling of his magic vanished, leaving her cold. Looking at his sharp features, she wondered perhaps if she'd at last found the limits of his tolerance. And perhaps in her hasty rejection that night, she'd made herself another enemy.

_The Goblin King wears a thousand faces,_ Sarah William's writings offered her. _Beware of him when he seems most gentle and persuadable, for that is when he knows he has you._ But the long-dead woman's memories offered nothing more than a text Sarah Tomolino already knew by heart.

He stepped back, drawing his clasped palms apart until a crystal rested beneath them. He rolled it carelessly between his long fingers, clearly anticipating her reaction.

She was less quick to cringe than before, but it still came.

His fingers stilled. Slowly, he pressed his palms together until the bauble disappeared. Crossing his arms, he waited.

She was afraid to ask what it might have contained, and knew from the sudden eagerness in his stance that he knew it as well. There was ancient pain etched on his face, lines marking impossible age.

Abruptly, her anger disappeared into the serene room, broken once more into a regret that made her ache. She almost stepped forward, almost held her hand to him. But whatever lay between them, it wasn't quite strong enough.

Sarah cleared her throat. "I'm. . . sorry. That I keep doing this. That we keep ending like this."

Her eyes met his wordlessly, and then she looked down.

There was a long silence.

"Your kind were given many short lives instead of one full one," he offered, his voice softer than she'd expected. "Your gift was the ability to forget each one in turn, that you could start each new turn unhindered by more than the vaguest guidelines of the past. We were given only one chance to live, but our lot was to remember all of it, that we might learn and thus not waste our unbroken time. I have yet to see proof that either gift was, indeed, a gift at all."

A sneer twisted his lips, but it was half-hearted and quickly faded. "We have all done much that we might forget. And I have watched your kin stumble around blindly, time after time, when the knowledge from their past lives might have led them to greatness."

She looked past his shoulder, where she could only see pure white reflected back at her. "Then this knowing of mine. . . is wrong. I shouldn't have it" She blinked back tears that seared her eyes, blurring him to harsh strip of gold-capped darkness. "Why did you do it if it was. . . wrong?"

"It was permitted," he corrected. "You were never meant to rejoin that cycle once you met me. You were supposed to stay with me as my companion, and I would have made you one of us."

"Without my permission?" she cried, feeling the beginning of disgust.

"With your permission," he answered. "Your memories are still incomplete. You hide from them, because you are afraid what you would find."

"You say I chose to do this. . . to stay. . . "

"To be with me. You understand."

She threw up her hands, flinging herself away in a blind stumble. "No! You're just saying this! You just want to take advantage of your own mistakes!"

Her next words slipped out before she could stop them, flying out of her mouth too quick to call them back. "And you would have given me my past lives back as well. Made me who I am against the rules. Abomination." She couldn't watch him as she spoke. She searched for a door without her burned-out eyes, palm sliding down cool stone, searching. She wanted it to be there, so it would be there. If she wished hard enough.

"You were living your first life, Sarah. You met me, and chose to stay with me when I offered."

"But you already said this wasn't more than a thousand years ago. Where was I before?"

"The Great Divine," he said, but she knew whatever word he'd said was not what came to her. This phrase, though, resonated strangely in her mind, hurtling around memories as if searching for the one to which it belonged. The pendant warmed, almost burning her skin where it lay.

She looked over her shoulder from where she sought the door seam to see him watching her with far too much interest for such a flippant comment. Panic gave way to something stronger.

"You tried that deliberately," she said. "Don't ever do that again. They're mine to find."

"Sarah," he said, just as her fingers slid into the invisible hollow of the seam, She tugged the door open, stepping through without fear into the blackness beyond.

Nothingness was welcome to what she left behind.

Behind her, the Goblin King looked down at where he stood on the center of the labyrinth pattern. "Twice in one day," he said dryly. "Lucky me." His brow creased thoughtfully as he considered where he stood in relation to the center of the pattern. It had not been where Sarah had stood, although the casual observer would notice they'd been on the same space on the floor.

The labyrinth had shifted beneath his feet. As its master he could read the nuances with a practiced eye.

Whatever he saw caused him to clench his fist angrily and bend half over for a closer look.

Then he strode out of the hall, hair tousled by the speed of his passage. The door disappeared as the wall sealed itself behind him. Slowly, the map of the Labyrinth faded, leaving the circular room empty, lit from within with cold brightness.

-----

She had found herself in another round room, a plain one, with doors to the north, west and east. She chose east, hissing as the handle burned her with heat. She held on stubbornly until it opened enough for her to slip through, and chose random directions as she walked down unfamiliar corridors, furniture shrouded in great swathes of fabric.

At last she found herself in a low-ceilinged hall with spotlights and sharp right angles, with strange, jutting walls that seemed to have no real order. The projecting walls had velvet curtains that half-covered paintings, allowing her only to see a corner of canvas at a time, with maybe a worked frame or gleam of glass covering.

A painting of dark red blotches slapped on a pale, eye-hurting green made her stop for a moment. Beyond the cloth that hid the right side, she was sure the spatter of paint drops formed some sort of shape. She reached for the fabric, about to push it away. The velvet was shockingly cold beneath her fingertips, as cold as the floor of the Labyrinth's center had been when she touched it. The pendant warmed against her collarbone, reminding her of its giver.

"Don't," warned Jareth from behind her. She jumped, looking over shoulder to see him lurking behind her, face set. His arms were crossed. "Retrieving you would be difficult from a painting such as that."

"Then just leave me there," she snapped, turning back to the painting. The numb obedience of the last hour had faded, and his warning only made her move faster. She was determined not to listen to his bluff.

Jareth grabbed her wrist, holding it locked as he pried the cloth out of her fist with his other hand. As the velvet rippled away from her grasp, he held her at a careful arm's length. "I understand this is difficult for you. Try to get it through your empty head that you are Sarah Williams, hard as it seems for to grasp an actual thought. Furthermore, assume, for once, that others may know more than you. I know something of what drove you here. Trust me when I say the past years have been far worse on this side of the gateways." He stared at her for a long moment, arms trembling in exertion. But to keep her from hurting him? Or to keep him from her?

She realized she didn't know, and shuddered.

Jareth acted immediately. "You are safe here," he said, dropping his arms.

"That's not what you think." It was a goad, not a real guess, but the sudden tight clench of his jaw confirmed it. It was enough.

"Why are we not safe here?" She looked at him in accusation, her anger at her own weakness sharply focused. "In her time, you were powerful enough to protect humans who fled to you."

His eyes darkened as arrogance, never far from the Goblin King, reemerged with a vengeance. "It is not my protection that is the issue, Sarah!" His voice was harsh, forcing her backwards as if she'd been struck.

How stupid could she be? Part of her was very aware that she stayed here only at Jareth's sufferance. But her stubbornness, especially that old pride that had beaten him the first time, kept rising to the surface every time she saw him. He had been uncharacteristically mild, at least until she had baited him. He would never be nice, she suspected, but this was as close as she would get to seeing it, and she had already blown it at least twice today.

He was walking away, obviously expecting her to follow. "I will take you back to your room, and send Hoggle if you wish to walk about."

With one last look at the painting, she followed him.

-----

The Falconer's thoughts were perfectly logical, given the premise. When confronted with void-walking nightmare hounds with a taste for trespassing souls, there were really only two solutions. Either build an impervious barrier spell, or throw enough bones in the dog's path that he could slip by unnoticed.

The Falconer did not have a personal talent for shielding, or a coven of magic-users to borrow that proficiency from. What he did have was a nearly unlimited supply of talented, captive, and untrained magicians, more than enough to serve as sources. The rest were surplus, stockpiled for a need like this one. They were talented enough to be appealing bait, but not trained and therefore easy to coerce into crossing into the void.

The choice of methods took no time at all.

Forty-three adults and children stood in the chalk circle, drawn at the base of the walls to hold them all. The youngest was three, the oldest sixty-two. They spoke six natural languages; two artificial and one extra-range coding that involved the use of colored lights as modifiers. They were a diverse group in height, weight, skin color, intelligence, education and wealth. Some were rebels and one was one of Chie's formerly dearest friends, until said friend unexpectedly came down with a bad case of telepathy. They had only two characteristics in common: the strength of their manifested talents and the sightless, opaque eyes that were the first gift of the Falconer to all his acquisitions. They stood, silent and bespelled, forming a second circle inside the chalk circle.

Inside the concentric rings, the Falconer stood, eyes closed and hands raised as he probed the fabric of the way between worlds. Now he pushed, now he pulled, sometimes making slashing motions with his hands. His mouth moved, forming words that echoed in the void. A frown creased his brow. The way in was exceptionally protected now, although he was sure he hadn't been discovered in his earlier attempts. Still, there was a weakness somewhere. He knew it. He just had to find it.

The hounds in the dark smelt the magic, heard the chants, and began to search.

Forty-three sightless slaves shivered, rattling the iron chains that bound them together.

-----

There was a knock on the door. Looking up from the heavy tome on her lap, Sarah forced a smile. "Come in!"

To her delight, Tommy walked in. "Hiya," he said, grinning as he scrambled onto the bed beside her. She ruffled his hair affectionately. "Whatcha looking at?"

"It's a history book," she said, shrugging one shoulder at the stack on the bedside table. "The Goblin King gave me a few." He had actually sent two goblins to bring them, which was good, since she might have thrown the books at him if he'd given her the chance.

Tommy wrinkled his nose. "History of what? Sounds boring?"

She smiled wryly. "I don't know where, or what. It's a battle between goblins and elves. I'm not even sure if it's a real story or not. But it's something to do."

He looked at her, puzzled. "But why don't you walk around?

"Because I don't want to speak to the Goblin King."

"And why don't you call him Jareth?"

"Because I don't want to."

He sat up from where he had been sprawled across the pillows. "Did you two fight or something?"

Pain slashed through her with his simple question. How could she explain what lay between the two of them? She had cast him as her archenemy but fled to him for protection. She had been stung by his words and actions but had also seen the raw emotions that spilled through his control. She was afraid of him, but she couldn't forget the midnight waltz, or last night's encounter. She was afraid that all she felt for him was stolen from another life, and none of it from this own. She couldn't even begin to describe the mess she was in to another person.

Sarah closed the book, considering what to say. "Maybe. I mean, yes."

"You shouldn't. He's neat."

She was surprised by how quickly he had dropped his suspicions, and anger chased confusion away. "He doesn't understand us. He's just shuffling the two of us around, playing with us. Don't you see that?"

Tommy looked at her with guileless blue eyes. "He's teaching me magic. And this is better than any place I've ever been before. Did you see the flying horses?"

She stiffened. "He's been showing you around?"

"No, I've been with Catsqueak. And sometimes Hoggle. They're teaching me to play goblin poker tonight."

Sarah rolled her eyes. "Oh, are they?"

"You can come!" He tugged at her shirt. "Hoggle wants to see you. He told me to ask you. That's why I came by."

She was jealous that Tommy was spending time with her friend, and all she had was the constant appearances of the Goblin King. "I think I'll stay here tonight, thanks." She wanted to, but didn't want to attract Jareth's attention in any way. Staying in her room felt safe, for now.

Tommy was standing on the bed now, taking in the closed drapes and mustiness of the room. "Why don't you at least go to the garden with the pool? It's nice there. I can give you directions. And Jareth doesn't go there much. He told me so. He only brought me there because he thought it might help my magic."

She remembered how Tommy had seemed to belong underneath the blossom-laden trees and Jareth had looked so out of place. It was easy to believe that he didn't normally go there. And it had been peaceful under the trees, with the blue sky above and the blue pool at her feet. More importantly, the longer she stayed in the room the more she invited another visit from the Goblin King.

That decided her. She slid off the bed. "Okay. Tell me how to get there."

Tommy explained as she put on the slippers, chattering happily about the neat things she'd see on the way. She listened more carefully to the directions, cutting him off as he began to talk about the stables again.

"Let me make sure I have this," she said slowly. "Down the hallway, until I see a black door with a black handle. Then two rights, and keep walking until I reach a hall with lots of heavy drapes?"

He nodded. "Walk through it. It's long and it'll take a while. But when it ends, you'll be able to see the door to the pool."

She smoothed the sleeves of her shirt, letting her fingers trail down the material. Goblin King's or not, it was still amazing to have the luxury of fresh, clean clothes. Reaching behind to make sure her braid was still intact, she nodded to Tommy.

"Come get me when you'd like to eat." She tucked the book under her arm. "I'm off."

"Bye!"

His directions were simple enough to follow, although they had sounded vague when she'd first heard them. There was no other black door in sight, and the right turns were close enough to the door that she wasn't worried she'd missed one.

A few steps into the passage that Tommy had mentioned she realized where he had sent her. Focused lights traced bright circles on the floor. Heavy velvet drapes covered walls, muffling the sound of her footsteps. The walls leaned towards the ceiling, lending the space the feel of a mausoleum. Each soft footfall felt like an intrusion, and she half-expected alarms to scream and guards to rush as she wandered down the broken line of the hallway, looking at each revealed sliver of painting.

She could see the other end of the corridor now. Just a bit further, and she could be reading against a tree, the still pool at her feet.

Jareth had told her it would be dangerous to look at the paintings. But right now, she didn't feel like listening to him. She could feel the room waiting, watching, guarding. Whatever treasures it held, it was something she was not supposed to see. She had read that in the warning in his face, his quick attempt to get her away, and his refusal to answer any more questions about the painting.

Perhaps whatever was held here could give her answers.

She stopped. The corridor was long, but the paintings were widely spaced. The crazy corners and confusing walls made it hard to tell, but she was almost sure this was near where she had been when Jareth appeared.

She walked to the nearest painting and started in surprise when she recognized the red blotches of the work she was looking for. She grabbed the icy velvet and flung it back before it could freeze her fingers, determined to see what it had protected.

The splatter of paint was chaotic on the side the drapes hadn't covered, but as it moved from right to left they coalesced into a pattern. Together, they formed a face profile with high cheekbones, and long, streaming hair, tilted out of proper position until it was nearly a three-quarters sidelong glance.

It was her face, magnified through the genetic structure of a different culture and lifetime.

And it looked very, very old.

The outswept hair, the formerly random splashes she had taken for abstract art, formed something else at the edges where paint dissolved into canvas: a running wolf, weaving in and out of the strands as it chased its invisible prey.

As she looked, the wolf turned to her and growled.

Sarah jumped back. The wolf began pacing back and forth on the canvas, worrying tiny braids worked into the long hair of her other self. She had thought it was painted with dark red-brown paint, but a more primitive part of her realized that the pigment was the brown-red-rust of old blood. Even as she watched the wolf move, unable to look away from its hunt, the paint began to liquefy, beading up through the canvas until it gleamed wetly in the harsh spotlight.

Then the face turned, blood running through the grainy canvas--cured, scraped hide--until a seamless oval face with empty eyes gazed out.

The wolf snapped.

Sarah reached a trembling finger to touch a lock of the girl's hair, crying out as the blood ran up her finger.

A moment later, she was gone.

**-----**

The Falconer's hands froze. In the tower, his hands gripped empty air, white-knuckled. Where his mind wandered, he grasped something else.

He could feel wild magic, suddenly unconfined. Strong magic. Powerful magic. The backlash pushed at the flimsy containment held taut between his hands, snapping the weave fiber by fiber until it was paper-thin. It subsided, but the damage was already done. All it would take was one last push and it would be broken.

He could feel the power of the world beyond beginning to shimmer beyond that fragile protection. No sniffer could find this point; no spinner could mend it. He held it in his hands, quiescent.

He took a deep breath.

There was a noise like the muffled crumpling sound of a collapsing paper bag, and a roar of inrushing air as the top of the tower collapsed. The falling stones buried the forty-three bodies lying still in the broken circle. Each corpse was nut-brown and desiccated, hands curled defensively in a sudden, futile last fight against the draining of their magic.

It was said that Chie fainted when the Mekuzae told her he was gone.

-----

Half a kingdom away, visiting an isolated part of his realm, Jareth looked up in sudden surprise. Panic chased across his face, but the grain factor quoting the expected yields did not notice.

"And, sire..."

The confused factor looked at his lord, who was now staring up at the sky, head tilted to better listen. The factor cocked his green-scaled head but heard nothing more than the production sounds of a busy farm combine.

"Sire?"

Smoke drifted on the wind from a nearby trash bonfire. The Goblin King reached out and grabbed a handful of smoke, rubbing it between his hands until a bit of parchment appeared. He read the scrawled charcoal glyphs hurriedly before turning to the factor.

"Other matters require my attention."

Before the factor could stammer his understanding, Jareth had vanished. The paper drifted downwards, separating into coils of blue smoke before it could hit the ground.

---------------------------------------

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**Author's notes:**

Wow, over a year to finish this. I never want to go that long again and I'm trying very hard to have the final chapter out before September. Thanks to everyone out there for all the lovely reviews--they always remind me to open up the latest draft and type a little more. As always, concrit is more than appreciated.

And a final million thanks to neversaynever, who cheerfully tackles my rough drafts and polishes them up so pretty.


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